CHARLES DIBDIN AND LATE GEORGIAN CULTURE

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CHARLES DIBDIN AND LATE GEORGIANCULTURE

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 20/10/2017, SPi


Charles Dibdin and LateGeorgian Culture

Edited byOSKAR COX JENSENDAV ID KENNERLEY

andIAN NEWMAN

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Foreword

Roger Parker

The ERC-funded project from which this book derives had, at its start in 2013,some bracingly ambitious aspirations. Called ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’, itaimed to construct a wide-ranging interdisciplinary history of its chosen topic, inthe process contributing to a new kind of music history. The rationale behind thisplan was that previous institutional accounts of Western music-making havemostly—there are of course exceptions—focused on elite culture; whereas ‘Musicin London’ had as its focus a period and a city which, for both material andaesthetic reasons, offered excellent opportunities for exploring a broader and moreinclusive kind of history. Music-making in nineteenth-century London, involvingas it did a populace of unprecedented size and affluence, functioned as a widely-based industry, providing much professional employment and featuring in theeducation of many an amateur; it also contributed to private and public enjoyment,became a source of boredom and occasional irritation, and fostered the creation of ahost of cultural, political, and imagined communities. A history that took seriouslyall of these functions might enable twenty-first-century scholars frommany fields tounderstand more fully music’s affective presence in nineteenth-century society.Needless to say, the wider project has of necessity been anything but all-

inclusive. Certain common themes among its activities have, however, grown tobe significant, and one of the most important has been the emergence of a historicalapproach that tends to erode the usual barriers between what are now usually called‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture. This has become a focus of many of the project’s majoractivities, but in none has it been more central than the present volume. Indeed,the career of Charles Dibdin might offer something like a one-man illustrationof the fruitfulness of mobility between cultural levels: a mobility that, later inthe nineteenth century, would become increasingly difficult to achieve, becauseincreasingly imbued with negative associations. In this sense, it is both necessaryand important that this book’s contributors themselves come from a range ofacademic disciplines, thus illustrating the kind of eclecticism of purview thatmade Dibdin himself such a potent force during his career, without relinquishingthe benefits of specialization that made him such an object of nostalgia in the longafterlife of his achievements.



Acknowledgements

There is a chance that Charles Dibdin would have approved of this book. As bothan inveterate—albeit cantankerous—collaborator, and an autodidact in a remark-able number of professional fields, he would, perhaps, have applauded our study ofhis cultural world, part of the five-year project ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’, ledby Roger Parker at King’s College London, and conducted from the first in a spiritof open and enthusiastic collaboration between scholars of at least six disciplines.And since Dibdin’s perennial suspicion of governments, ministries, and theirschemes does not appear to have prevented him from accepting institutionalfunding, he might even have welcomed the generous support of the body thathas made this project possible, the European Research Council. The two-dayworkshop at which this volume was refined, in November 2014, was also thefruit of transatlantic cooperation, held jointly at the University of Notre Dame’sLondon Center, and King’s College London’s Strand Campus. We would like tothank the staff of both institutions for their help and hospitality, and the NotreDame College of Arts and Letters and the Institute for Scholarship in the LiberalArts for their financial support. Above all, we are in the debt of Angela Waplington,the peerless administrator of the ‘Music in London’ project.Besides the contributors to this book, that workshop benefited immeasurably

from the presence of further friends and colleagues, and we are eternally grateful forthe energy and insights of Jeremy Barlow, Jacky Bratton, James Grande, KatherineHambridge, Jonathan Hicks, Ian Honeyman, Eric Lewis, and Gavin Williams.As the book assumed its final shape, our various contributors have been helped

and guided by others outside these pages, and so we owe our collective thanks to theadvice and support of John Barrell, Anna Maria Barry, Olivia Bloechl, JeaniceBrooks, Kathryn Gleadle, Bob Harris, Carmen Holdsworth-Delgado, EssakaJoshua, Greg Kucich, Pollyana Lutz, Marcus Risdell, and Roxann Wheeler.We owe a further debt to numerous institutions, especially those that have

granted permission to reproduce images held in their collections: the BritishLibrary, the British Museum, the Casa Goldoni Museum of Venice, The GarrickClub, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the National Maritime Museum, the TheatreMuseum of London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.As contributors, and perhaps especially as editors, we would like to thank our

anonymous readers, and also Jacqueline Norton, Catherine Owen, and AimeeWright of Oxford University Press, and our copy-editor Ian Brookes, for theirexpert and keen-eyed assistance. Unending thanks go to Roger Parker as instigatorof the wider project and pioneer of its working methods. Above all, the three editorscan only begin to express their gratitude to their collaborators in this venture: nevercan there have been such a generous—and efficient!—set of contributors as may befound within these pages.



Contents

List of Figures xiList of Examples xvList of Tables xviiList of Abbreviations xixList of Contributors xxiA Chronology of Charles Dibdin xxv

1. Introducing Mr Dibdin 1Ian Newman, Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley

PART I. DIBDIN IN CONTEXT

2. ‘Mungo Here, Mungo There’: Charles Dibdin and Racial Performance 23Felicity Nussbaum

3. Dibdin at the Royal Circus 43Michael Burden

Interlude 1. Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield: Voicing the Clown in Town 59Katie Osborn

4. The Detail is in The Devil: Dibdin’s Patriotism in the 1780s 64David O’Shaughnessy

5. Loyalism, Celebrity, and the Politics of Personality: Dibdin in the 1790s 78David Kennerley

6. Dibdin and the Dilettantes 94Judith Hawley

Interlude 2. Dibdin and Jane Austen: Musical Cultures of Gentry Women 108Nicola Pritchard-Pink

PART II. SONGS IN FOCUS

7. ‘True Courage’: A Song in History 115Oskar Cox Jensen

8. A Motley Assembly: ‘The Margate Hoy’ 137Harriet Guest

Interlude 3. Dibdin and John Raphael Smith: Print Culture and Fine Art 158Nicholas Grindle



PART III . NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSITIONS

9. The Changing Theatrical Economy: Charles Dibdin the Youngerat Sadler’s Wells, 1814–19 171Susan Valladares

10. Writing for Actors: The Dramas of Thomas Dibdin 189Jim Davis

11. ‘Each Song Was Just Like a Little Sermon’: Dibdin’sVictorian Afterlives 204Isaac Land

Afterword: Dibdin’s Miscellany 221Mark Philp

Bibliography 229Index 245

Contentsx



List of Figures

2.1. William West, West’s New Plate of Harlequins in Various Positions. Fromoriginal drawings, in possession of Mr. Ellor. Harlequin to the SurreyTheatre. London, 16 March 1824. Engraving. Courtesy of Theatre Museum,London. Victoria and Albert Images/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. 28

2.2. Alexandre Manceau, Harlequin or Arlecchino of 1671. Engraving. FromMaurice Sand, Masque et bouffons (comédie italienne): texte et dessins(Paris, 1860). Courtesy of Casa Goldoni Museum, Venice. Photographedby Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. 29

2.3. Butler Clowes, Mr. Dibdin as the Character of Mungo, in the Celebrated Operaof the PADLOCK (1768). London, 1769. Mezzotint. Courtesy of the HarvardTheatre Collection. 31

2.4. Mr. Dibden in the Character of Mungo. Engraving. From Dramatic Characters,or Different Portraits of the English Stage (London, 1779). 32

2.5. Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin, ‘Sung by Mr. Bannister’, The Padlock,A Comic Opera: as it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane(London, 1768). 34

3.1. Anonymous, A view of the Royal Circus in St George’s Fields.Oil on canvas, c.1795. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 45

3.2. Thomas Rothwell, ‘The interior of the Royal Circus’. London, 1795.From Lady’s Pocket Magazine (London, 1795). Engraving. © EnthovenCollection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 47

3.3. Charles Tomkins, Grand Tournament, in the presence of the EmperorCharlemagne in his chariot of chivalry. London, 30 September 1800. Engraving.© Trustees of the British Museum. 51

6.1. ‘Sans Souci’, Morning Post (8 October 1791). Advertisement. © The BritishLibrary Board. 102

7.1. Thomas Rothwell after Benedictus Antonio van Assen, ‘Sans-Souci’. FromPocket Magazine (London, c.1796). Engraving. Courtesy of the Trustees ofthe British Museum. 125

7.2. George and James Foggo, ‘True Courage’. From Illustrations of Dibdin.London, 1830. Lithograph on chine collé. Courtesy of the Trusteesof the British Museum. 135

8.1. A Scene on Board a Margate Hoy, as described by Dibdin. London,7 January 1804. Hand-coloured etching. Courtesy of The Lewis WalpoleLibrary, Yale University. 142

8.2. Charles Catton the Elder, Margate Hoy. London, 19 August 1785.Hand-coloured etching. Auchincloss Rowlandson Collection, BeineckeRare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 144



8.3. Isaac Cruikshank, Voyage to Margate. London, 1 January 1786.Hand-coloured etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library,Yale University. 145

8.4. Charles Dibdin, ‘Blow high, blow low’. London, 1794. Song slip.The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Harding B 11 (334). 147

8.5. Charles Dibdin, ‘Jackey and the Cow’. London, 1796. Engraving.© Museum of London. 148

8.6. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Fair’. London, 1793. Engraving. The BodleianLibraries, The University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection:Ballads, fol. 357a. 149

8.7. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Greenwich Pensioner’. London, 1791. Hand-colouredetching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 150

8.8. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Advantage of Toping’. London, 1807. Etching.Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 151

8.9. Robert Clamp after George Morland, The Contented Waterman.London, 1797. Stipple etching. Courtesy of the Trustees of the BritishMuseum. 152

8.10. Robert Clamp after George Morland, Jack in the Bilboes. London, 1797.Stipple etching. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 152

8.11. (a) William Ward after George Morland, The Contented Waterman.London, 1806. Mezzotint. Courtesy of the Trustees of the BritishMuseum. (b) William Ward after George Morland, Jack in the Bilboes.London, 1790. Mezzotint. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library,Yale University. 153

8.12. Thomas Rowlandson, Margate Hoy. London, 12 January 1795.Hand-coloured etching. Private collection. 154

8.13. Thomas Rowlandson, A Fresh Breeze. London, 4 August 1789. Etching.Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 155

8.14. Piercy Roberts, A Sketch on board a Margate Hoy!! London, c.1795–1805.Hand-coloured etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library,Yale University. 156

I3.1. ‘Poll and my Partner Joe’. London, 1794. Mezzotint, 36.7 ! 27 cm.© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. 159

I3.2. Anon., The Elopement, London, 1795. Hand-coloured mezzotint,35 ! 24.5 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 160

I3.3. John Raphael Smith after George Morland, The Elopement, London,1789. Stipple engraving, 47 ! 35.3 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees ofthe British Museum. 162

I3.4. Charles Dibdin, Church at Lyme Regis, n.d. Brush drawing in grey washon paper, 27.1 ! 40.4 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 165

I3.5. Anne Dibdin after Charles Dibdin, ‘Approach to Langholm’,London, 1801. Aquatint. From Observations. © The British LibraryBoard, 190.c.4–5 vol. 1 facing page 326. 166

List of Figuresxii



9.1. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomime‘London and Paris’ (London, 1816), depicting Hôtel des Invalides.Pen and watercolour. From Sadler’s Wells Scene Book. Courtesyof The Garrick Club, London. 176

9.2. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomime‘London and Paris’ (London, 1816), depicting Chelsea Hospital. Pen andwatercolour. From Sadler’s Wells Scene Book. Courtesy of The Garrick Club,London. 177

9.3. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomime‘London and Paris’ (London, 1816), depicting Greenwich. Pen andwatercolour. From Sadler’s Wells Scene Book. Courtesy of The GarrickClub, London. 178

11.1. Promotional poster for An Hour with Dibdin and a Miscellaneous Act.London, 1844. Hand-coloured engraving. MS Thr 198 143-144, HoughtonLibrary, Harvard University. 211

xiiiList of Figures



List of Examples

7.1. Charles Dibdin, ‘True Courage, written & composed by Mr. Dibdin,and Sung by him in his New Entertainment, called A Tour to the Land’s End.Pri.1s. London, Printed & Sold by the Author, at his Music Warehouse,Leicester Place, Leicester Square.’ London, 1798. 119

7.2. Charles Dibdin arr. Francis Lancelott, ‘True Courage’, bars 44–50,in Hogarth, vol. 2, 204. 133



List of Tables

7.1. Unauthorized extant editions of ‘True Courage’ in cheap print. 12811.1. An Hour with Dibdin and a Miscellaneous Act concert programme,

Hanover Square Rooms, 2 March 1844. 213



List of Abbreviations

BL British LibraryBod. Bodleian LibraryODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

WORKS BY DIBDIN

By-stander The By-stander; or, Universal Weekly Expositor. By a Literary Association(London, 1789–90)

Devil The Devil, 2 vols (London, 1786–7)Life The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, written by himself, together with the words

of six hundred songs, 4 vols (London, 1803)Mentor The Musical Mentor, or St. Cecilia at School (London, 1805)Musical Tour The Musical Tour of Mr. Dibdin; in which—previous to his embarkation for

India—he finished his career as a public character (Sheffield, 1788)Observations Observations on a Tour through almost the whole of England, and a considerable

part of Scotland, in a series of letters, addressed to a large number of intelligentand respectable friends, 2 vols (London, 1802)

FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

Fahrner Robert Fahrner, The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder(1745–1814) (New York: Lang, 1989)

Hogarth George Hogarth, The Songs of Charles Dibdin, chronologically arranged, withnotes, historical, biographical, and critical, 2 vols (London, 1842, 1848)

Kitchiner William Kitchiner, The Sea Songs of Charles Dibdin, with a memoir of his lifeand writings by William Kitchiner, M.D. (London, 1823)

Taylor Edward Taylor, ‘Charles Dibdin’, in Royal College of Music, TaylorCollection 2143, Series 6 of 7 of Edward Taylor’s lectures on EnglishDramatic Music, Lecture 3



List of Contributors

Michael Burden is Professor of Opera Studies at Oxford University, and Fellow in Music atNew College, where he is also Dean. His research is on the music of Henry Purcell, and ondance and music in eighteenth-century London theatres. He is completing a volume on thestaging of opera in London; his five-volume collection of opera documents, London OperaObserved, and his study of Regina Mingotti were both published in 2013. A volume editedwith Jennifer Thorp entitled The works of Monsieur Noverre translated from the French:Noverre, his circle, and the English Lettres sur la danse, appeared in 2014. He is Director ofProductions of New Chamber Opera (newchamberopera.co.uk).

Oskar Cox Jensen is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of History, Queen MaryUniversity of London, prior to which he was a Research Fellow for ‘Music in London,1800–1851’ at King’s College London. He is the author of Napoleon and British Song,1797–1822 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and a forthcoming monograph, The LondonBallad-Singer, 1792–1864. His current projects are a composite biography of street indi-genes in nineteenth-century London, and, with David Kennerley, a series of articles onmusic and politics, c.1780–1850. He has published in journals including Cultural and SocialHistory, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and Studies in Romanticism.

Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His major researchinterest is in nineteenth-century British theatre and his most recent books are Comic Actingand Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015)and Theatre & Entertainment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is joint-author, with VictorEmeljanow, of the prize-winning Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880(University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001). A two-volume edition of nineteenth-centurydramatizations of Dickens (with Jacky Bratton) for Oxford University Press is currently inproduction. He is also an editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.

Nicholas Grindle teaches in the Arena Centre for Research-based Education at UniversityCollege London. He curated the exhibition George Morland: In the Margins at the Stanleyand Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds in 2015.

Harriet Guest is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies andDepartment of English, University of York. Her most recent book is Unbounded Attach-ment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press,2013). Her current research includes a project on British seaside resorts before the railways.

Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, Universityof London. She is a founding member and, with Mary Isbell, co-director of Researchers inAmateur Performance and Private Theatricals (RAPPT.org). With Mary Isbell, she hasguest-edited a special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film devoted to private andamateur drama. Her essay on the Margravine of Anspach’s private theatricals was includedin Elaine McGirr and Laura Engell (eds), Stage Mothers: Women, Work and the Theatre1660–1830 (Bucknell University Press, 2014). In addition, she has published on a broadrange of eighteenth-century topics including satire, encyclopaedism, and gender.



David Kennerley is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of History at Queen MaryUniversity of London. His research explores the history of sound, music, and performancein Britain in the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on sonic aspects of gender,and of political culture. His work has recently been published in the Historical Journal, andhas featured in a Bodleian Library exhibition and accompanying book on Staging History,1780–1840. He is currently completing a monograph on female singers in early-nineteenth-century Britain, and, with Oskar Cox Jensen, editing a collection of essays on music andpolitics from c.1780–1850.

Isaac Land is Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University. He is the authorof War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),and writes ‘The Coastal History Blog’ for the Port Towns & Urban Cultures project(porttowns.port.ac.uk).

Ian Newman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where hespecializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature. He is currentlycompleting a book, The Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution. Hiswork has appeared in Studies in English Literature, European Romantic Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Romanticism.He is also the author of a digital project tracingthe meeting places of the London Corresponding Society and is a founding editor of theKeats Letters Project.

Felicity Nussbaum is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, LosAngeles, and author of Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-CenturyBritish Theatre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Among her other books are TheArabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford University Press, 2008) with Saree Makdisi;The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2003); Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire (Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1995); and The Autobiographical Subject (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Heressays on eighteenth-century drama have appeared recently in The Oxford Handbook of theGeorgian Theatre and PMLA. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she is pursuing projects on entertainments about slavery and the Orient, aswell as a book on Hester Thrale Piozzi.

Katie Osborn is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Sheis currently a scholar advisor to the Indiana Humanities Council and has helped developLaboring-Class Poets Online, a database of more than 1,600 British and Irish working-classpoets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

David O’Shaughnessy is Assistant Professor for Eighteenth-Century Studies at TrinityCollege Dublin. He is the author of William Godwin and the Theatre (Pickering & Chatto,2010), and has published widely on Godwin and on eighteenth-century theatre. His workhas appeared in or is forthcoming in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Life, Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and HLQ. He is currently work-ing on a project on eighteenth-century theatre censorship and, with Michael Griffin, editingThe Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Oliver Goldsmith.

Roger Parker is Professor of Music at King’s College London, having previously taught atCornell, Oxford, and Cambridge. He is General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of theDonizetti critical edition, published by Ricordi. His most recent books are Remaking theSong: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (University of California Press,2006) and A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (Penguin, UK, and Norton, US,


List of Contributorsxxii


2012), written jointly with Carolyn Abbate. He is now working on a book about music inLondon in the 1830s, and is Director of the ERC-funded project ‘Music in London,1800–1851’.

Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick, and anEmeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He ran a recent Leverhulme-funded projectdigitizing and editing Godwin’s Diary with David O’Shaughnessy and Victoria Myers(godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and a project on Napoleon’s Hundred Days with KateAstbury (100days.eu). He runs ‘Re-imagining Democracy c.1750–1850’ with Joanna Innes(re-imaginingdemocracy.com). Recent publications include Reforming Political Ideas inBritain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2013), and, with Joanna Innes (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions:America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Nicola Pritchard-Pink is a classically-trained singer and former senior archives assistant whocompleted her Master’s degree in Eighteenth Century Studies with distinction at theUniversity of Southampton. She specialized in female domestic music of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries, analysing in particular the extant music collection of JaneAusten. Since then she has continued to research, lecture on, and perform these songs as asemi-professional singer and speaker.

Susan Valladares is a Departmental and College Lecturer in English at St Hugh’s College,University of Oxford. Her research interests span the long eighteenth century, with a specialfocus on theatre and performance, political history, and print culture. Her first book, Stagingthe Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815 (Routledge, 2015) explores how theatricalentertainments in England reflected and shaped public feeling on the long and bloodyattempt to drive French forces out of Spain and Portugal. She is currently writing on thenineteenth-century forms and media that furthered cultural understandings of tragedy, andon early Anglo-American re-enactments of the Caribbean Jonkanoo tradition.


xxiiiList of Contributors


A Chronology of Charles Dibdin

1745 Baptized in Southampton

1764 First stage work performed: all-sung pastoral The Shepherd’s Artifice (Covent Garden)

1765 Huge success as Ralph in Isaac Bickerstaff ’s The Maid of the Mill (CG); signs three-yearcontract at CG at £3, £4, and then £5/week

1767 Begins relationship with actress Harriet Pitt

Plays Watty Cockney in Bickerstaff ’s Love in the City; composes much of the score

1768 Writes two-thirds of the music for Bickerstaff ’s Lionel and Clarissa

Transfers (with Bickerstaff) to Drury Lane, under Garrick’s management

Plays Mungo in his and Bickerstaff ’s opera The Padlock (Drury Lane)

Birth of first son, Charles Isaac Mungo

1769 Composes music for Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee

The Recruiting Sergeant, The Maid the Mistress, and The Ephesian Matron all performed atRanelagh Gardens under a two-year contract (£100/season)

1770 Birth of first daughter, Harriet

1771 Birth of second son, Thomas John

1772 Press accusations of sodomy levelled at Bickerstaff, who flees to France

The Palace of Mirth and The Brickdustman performed (Sadler’s Wells)

1773 Comic opera, The Wedding Ring, first performed anonymously (DL); riot when audienceassumes it is by Bickerstaff, forcing Dibdin to acknowledge authorship

1774 The Waterman first performed (Haymarket)

1775 Marries Anne Maria Wylde

Discharged from DL after disputes with Garrick

1776 Baptism of second daughter, Anne

Flees to France to escape creditors

Opera The Seraglio performed in his absence (CG)

1778 Returns to Britain after France enters War of American Independence

Employed as house composer at £10/week until 1782 (CG)

1782 Enters partnership to manage Royal Circus and Philharmonic Academy; continues onand off until 1785

1786 Begins publication of a periodical, The Devil, until 22 Feb 1787

1787 First musical tour of Britain

1788 Publishes Musical Tour

Journey to India abandoned due to storms in Bay of Biscay

1789 First London solo show, The Whim of the Moment (King Street)

Begins publishing second periodical, The By-Stander, until 6 Feb 1790

Second solo show, The Oddities (Lyceum)



1791 Opens first Sans Souci theatre, 411 Strand, with Private Theatricals

1793 Publishes novel, The Younger Brother

1795 Christmas Gambols includes ‘The Margate Hoy’ (Sans Souci)

1796 Publishes second novel, Hannah Hewit, or, The Female Crusoe

Builds second, 500-seat Sans Souci Theatre, Leicester Place, for £6,000

Opens with The General Election

1797 Publication of five-volume Complete History of the English Stage until 1800

1798 Tour of Kent and Sussex, followed by a tour to Land’s End

A Tour to the Land’s End includes ‘True Courage’ (Sans Souci)

1800 After further touring, publishes Observations until 1802

1803 Publishes The Professional Life

Awarded pension of £200 by Addington administration; publishes British War Songs

Britons Strike Home (Sans Souci)

1805 First retirement from performance

Publishes Musical Mentor

1807 Pension revoked by Grenville administration; returns to London to work

Publishes third novel, Henry Hooka

1808 Professional Volunteers (Lyceum); Rent Day (Sans Pareil); The Melange (Assembly Rooms,Cateaton Street, and the Sans Pareil)

1809 Commodore Pennant (Dibdin’s Music Rooms, 125 Strand)

Declared bankrupt

1810 Public dinner raises £640

1811 Play The Round Robin closes after two nights (Haymarket)

1814 Death


A Chronology of Charles Dibdinxxvi

Comp. by: Kalaimathy Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 0003304477 Date:6/10/17Time:13:43:08 Filepath:c:/BgPr/OUP_CAP/IN/Process2/0003304477.3dDictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 1

1Introducing Mr Dibdin

Ian Newman, Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley

The conjectures concerning me are beyond number and credibility. Every manseems to have made of me just what suited his pleasure or convenience. Ihave been seven years in the West Indies, to learn how to perform Mungo;I have been three voyages to sea, as a surgeon of a man of war, to teach me sea-phrases; I have long enjoyed a private pension for my staunch attachment togovernment; and I have done a variety of other things, which are equallydevoid of foundation.1

With these typically forthright words Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) introduceshimself in his four-volume autobiography, The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin.He presents himself by declaring he needs no introduction: ‘every man’ knowsDibdin and is consequently free to make of him what he will. In the face of a delugeof false conjecture, The Professional Life attempts to set the record straight, declaringthe author’s commitment to truth over rumour, while simultaneously stoking thefires of the fame that had produced those rumours in the first place. For all thebluster of Dibdin’s prose, it would be hard to argue with the extent of his fame. Hewas an extremely well-known public character in the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries: an actor, singer, novelist, multi-instrumentalist, theatre man-ager, songwriter, journalist, publisher, and pioneer of the one-man show whosecontribution to late Georgian culture is as irrefutable as it is hard to characterize. Itis the contention of this volume that any serious consideration of late Georgianculture needs to engage not only with Dibdin himself but also with a culture thatwas able to sustain this kind of multifarious, polymathic, and intermedial career, forwhich Dibdin’s name became a byword.2Today it is perhaps less clear that Dibdin needs no introduction. While his name

has frequently appeared in accounts of eighteenth-century theatre and culture, hisimportance acknowledged by scattered references, he has rarely been the object of

1 Life, 1:2.2 See, for example, Coleridge’s letter in Blackwood’s Magazine in which he expresses his desire for a

full collection of religious symbols published in books, a project which would ‘well employ the talentsof our ingenious masters in wood-engraving, etching, and lithography under the superintendenceof a Dibdin’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 10 (1821): 257n. Thanks to Essaka Joshua for thereference.



sustained attention.3 Exceptions exist, most notably Robert Fahrner’s The TheatreCareer of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1989) and E. R. Dibdin’s A Charles DibdinBibliography (1937), and Dibdin plays a crucial role in Peter Tasch’s biography ofIsaac Bickerstaff. But these works inhabit a highly specialized position in thetwentieth-century historiography of the period, far removed from the widespreadappeal that his works enjoyed in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenthcenturies.4 There are, however, numerous signs of a revival of interest in Dibdin,both as an individual and as an important exemplar of late Georgian cultural trends.He has been central to Jacky Bratton’s work across several books mapping thetransitions from the eighteenth-century stage to Victorian theatrical traditions;5he has become important for scholars interested in the history of the representationof race on the British stage, mainly through his performances as Mungo in ThePadlock, though also more recently through his depictions of the Orient;6 scholarsinterested in the role that song played in the dissemination of loyalist ideas inBritain during the Napoleonic era have been drawn to the influence of his songs;7Jeremy Barlow is in the process of a thorough documentation of his regional tours;8within studies of the novel, Dibdin’sHannah Hewit is receiving belated recognitionas an important rewriting of the Crusoe myth;9 Peter Holman has recently arguedfor Dibdin’s importance as ‘the first English composer who could handle’ the newItalian ‘gallant’ style ‘with assurance’,10 while the continuing popularity of his songsamong a nineteenth-century polite audience, from Jane Austen’s songbooks to the

3 See, for example, John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the EighteenthCentury (New York: Routledge, 2013), 315–16; Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London,1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24; Gillian Russell, Women, Sociabilityand the Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136.

4 Fahrner; E. Rimbault Dibdin, A Charles Dibdin Bibliography (Liverpool: Privately Printed,1937); Peter A. Tasch, The Dramatic Cobbler: The Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff (Lewisburg:Bucknell University Press, 1972).

5 Jacky Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), 41–2;New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21, 120; TheMaking of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London,1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37.

6 Julie A. Carlson, ‘New Lows in Eighteenth-Century Theatre: The Rise of Mungo’, EuropeanRomantic Review 18/2 (2007): 139–47; Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Theatre, Islam and the Question ofMonarchy’ in Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the GeorgianTheatre, 1737–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 651.

7 Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke and New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89–99, 112–15; Mark Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain; Politics andLanguage in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2014), 238–57; Oskar Cox Jensen, Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822 (Basingstoke and New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

8 Jeremy Barlow, ‘Dibdin on Tour’, Early Music Performer 39–40 (forthcoming).9 Maximillian E. Novak, ‘Ideological Tendencies in Three Crusoe Narratives by British Novelists

during the Period Following the French Revolution: Charles Dibdin’s Hannah Hewit, The FemaleCrusoe, Maria Edgeworth’s Forester, and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer’, Eighteenth-Century Novel9 (2012): 261–80; Andrea Haslanger, ‘From Man-Machine to Woman-Machine: Automata, Fictionand Femininity in Dibdin’s Hannah Hewit and Burney’s Camilla’, Modern Philology: Critical andHistorical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary 11/4 (2014): 788–817.

10 Peter Holman, ‘The Sadler’s Wells Dialogues of Charles Dibdin’ in Rachel Cowgill, DavidCooper, and Clive Brown (eds), Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010), 164.

Newman, Cox Jensen, and Kennerley2



Victorian drawing room, is increasingly apparent;11 and theatre historians havebegun to explore individual pantomime entertainments, such as Vineyard Revels; orHarlequin Bacchanal, The Lancashire Witches; or the Distress of Harlequin, and TheTouchstone; or, Harlequin Traveller.12 The great difficulty with Dibdin scholarship,as this brief overview begins to suggest, is in the huge diversity and impact of hiswork; he is important to many different fields for often quite dissimilar reasons, anda sense of his overall accomplishments—never mind the powerful reverberations ofhis influence—across numerous areas and in different periods has been ill-served bythe disciplinary boundaries of our fields of academic enquiry.Even in Dibdin’s own account it is far from obvious why he was so well known.

The quotation above suggests three aspects of his career which he believed to bethe source of his renown: his character Mungo, the black servant he played inBickerstaff ’s 1768 afterpiece opera The Padlock, for which he also wrote the music,and which was the first entertainment on the British stage to feature a fully-developed comic blackface role as a hero or anti-hero; his sea-phrases, a referenceto the immense popularity of the songs, such as ‘Tom Bowling’, he wrote aboutsailors in a patriotic and sentimental mode; and finally, the role these songs playedin developing a loyalism that appeared to stabilize the nation after the politicalcontroversies of the early 1790s. According to The Professional Life, these aspects ofhis career—his acting, his songwriting, his politics—have resulted in a degree offame and accompanying public scrutiny that is at once invasive and inaccurate andfor which it is Dibdin’s duty, he feels, to compensate by providing an authoritativeaccount of his career.As a text, however, The Professional Life—or, to give the full title, The Professional

Life of Mr Dibdin, Written by Himself Together with the Words of Six Hundred SongsSelected from his Works Interspersed with Many Humourous and Entertaining Anec-dotes Incidental to the Public Character—obscures more than it illuminates. In thefirst place, it is not a standard autobiography, but an account only of his ‘profes-sional life’. It attempts (with mixed results) to eschew the private and the personalin order to present the authoritative ‘public’ Dibdin. He is, he insists, a skilledworker, and he wants to share his career, not his dirty laundry. His fame does notmean he has to surrender access to all aspects of his life, and he maintains aprofessional distance, characterized by calling himself ‘Mr Dibdin’, not Charles.Though far from humourless, Dibdin introduces himself with a sense of moralprobity that is at times severe. Yet accounts of his one-man shows, performedaround the time The Professional Life was written, suggest that part of Dibdin’scharm was precisely his easy familiarity, the back-and-forth chatter with audience

11 Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour,(2nd edn, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture inBritain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 153, 160.

12 DavidWorrall,Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–1832(Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 2006), 182–4; Frederick Burwick,Playing to the Crowd:London PopularTheatre, 1780–1830 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177–8; John O’Brien,‘Pantomime’, in Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre,1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–9.




members, and the energy with which he introduced himself as he came boundingout onto the stage, laughingwarmly, rubbing his hands together and greeting audiencemembers like old friends.13 All part of the act, no doubt, but Dibdin presented a verydifferent character in performance than the identity presented in his autobiography,suggesting his cautiousness around the public scrutiny he associated with print, andraising questions about the limits of The Professional Life’s claims to authenticity.The second way The Professional Life can be seen as an obfuscating text is in its

form. It is not simply an account of his career, but a combination of an autobio-graphical narrative and a selected works, containing the words to around sixhundred of his songs. Part of Dibdin’s point is to insist on the sheer quantity ofhis output. He is prolific, he wants you to know, a hard worker who deserves yourapprobation in part because of his ceaseless energy and dedication to his craft. Infact these six hundred songs are only one small part of his complete output. Thetotal number of his songs amounted to something in the region of a thousand,14not to mention the music (ballets, burlettas, comic operas, incidental music,intermezzos, pantomimes) he wrote for Covent Garden, Drury Lane, Haymarket,Ranelagh Gardens, the Royal Circus, and Sadler’s Wells, the full extent of which wewill probably never know. And this is to ignore his other written works: hisjournalism in The Devil and The By-stander, his accounts of his musical tours, hisnovels The Younger Brother and Hannah Hewit, his History of the English Stage—tosay nothing of the three musical textbooks and one further novel that werepublished after The Professional Life. The authorized Dibdin that we get in TheProfessional Life is introduced to us primarily as a songwriter, though it is by nomeans certain that this is his primary claim to fame. Earlier in his career he wasknown as an actor and singer, then as a theatre manager and innovator of equestrianentertainments at the Royal Circus. Much of his tremendous output receives scantattention as he tries to curate his legacy for the tastes of an early-nineteenth-centuryaudience increasingly attracted to specialized talents rather than the miscellaneousactivities that typified his earlier career.In the early years of the nineteenth century Dibdin was known as a writer of sea

songs that had helped to shape the popular image of the navy, although this wasonly ever a tiny percentage of his overall output—he wrote about ninety sea songs.Dibdin, frequently in financial straits, was rarely shy to seize a commercial oppor-tunity when he saw one, and, whatever else it might also be, The Professional Life isunambiguously an attempt to make some money by collecting together the wordsto his most popular songs and presenting them in an expensive, collectable four-volume edition. When we read the way that Dibdin introduces himself to us, then,we need to be alert to the fact that he is giving his early-nineteenth-century readerswhat he thinks they want. The success of the attempt might be measured by the factthat The Professional Life never made it to a second edition.The third way in which The Professional Life obscures as much as it illuminates is

in its anecdotal nature. It is ‘interspersed’, the title tells us, with ‘Many Humourous

13 See Fahrner, 122, and discussions by Kennerley, Cox Jensen, and Hawley in this volume.14 See Hogarth, ‘Preface’ [unpaginated].




and Entertaining Anecdotes Incidental to the Public Character’. It participates, thatis, in the fashionable form of the theatrical anecdote. The problem is that it is to therealm of the anecdote—the conjectural, engaging, short biographical narrative—that the authorized life offers itself as a corrective. And this is just one of theapparent contradictions in Dibdin’s turn to the anecdotal. The term ‘anecdote’derives from the Greek, an- ‘not’ + ekdotos ‘published’, and was defined in SamuelJohnson’s Dictionary as ‘something left unpublished; secret history’. Any publishedanecdote is by definition a kind of paradox, but one that can be resolved by theanecdote’s apparent ability to reveal the hidden life. As Helen Deutsch has arguedof the anecdotes collected about Samuel Johnson by Boswell and others, anecdotesreveal the desire for an intimate connection with the subject matter, to movebeyond, to supplement, and even to supplant authoritative published accounts.15To publish an anecdote, then, is to make available for a public that which wouldotherwise be left secret, thereby preserving these intimate histories for posterity.The anecdotal form of The Professional Life reveals a tension between Dibdin’s desireto establish an authoritative account—just the facts, none of the conjecture—and adesire to forge an intimate connection with his audience through entertaining stories.This is, perhaps, one of the key tensions operating throughout Dibdin’s career: hiscompeting desire formoral probity assured bymanly independence, and the approvalof a public upon which he relied for financial support.16We can see this in terms of atension between Dibdin’s eighteenth-century moral and social sensibility and hisoften forward-looking commercial instincts, born of his economic dependence upona marketplace of which he remains suspicious even as he exploits its potential.The anecdotal form of The Professional Life is also Dibdin’s attempt to shape his

reputation, to shore up the facts that will carry his name into immortality.‘Anecdotes’, Bratton writes, ‘are chiefly important as a control of social resourcesthrough the making of myth and legend’.17 And while this kind of myth-makingcan seem egregiously self-aggrandizing, Bratton argues that they also embed thestoryteller in a social world and reveal that world to us: ‘the recounting of anecdotes,which are the building blocks of theatrical memoir and biography, may be understoodnot simply as the vehicle of more or less dubious or provable facts, but as a process ofidentity-formation that extends beyond individuals to the group or community towhich they belong’.18There are, then, two different ways to think about the anecdote: an eighteenth-

century form that reveals the secret history of a beloved figure to a grateful public,and a later nineteenth-century iteration in which theatre people tell stories aboutthemselves, thereby revealing the social world in which they are embedded. Dibdinis caught between these two models, inclining towards the later idea but steeped inthe attitudes of an earlier moment, and wary of the implied egocentrism of thenineteenth-century teller of tall tales—his own anecdotes, he claims somewhatdisingenuously, are about ‘the Public Character’, not about himself.

15 Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 20.16 See Kennerley, Chapter Five in this volume. 17 Bratton, New Readings, 102–3.18 Ibid.




While The Professional Life was not the resounding commercial success for whichDibdin doubtless hoped, it was nevertheless profoundly successful in shapingDibdin’s posthumous reputation. The Dibdin it presents—a loyalist writer ofmelodious sea songs—is very much the Dibdin that Victorians celebrated andheld dear, as Isaac Land shows in Chapter Eleven. It is no coincidence that Dibdinis most often remembered today as the author of ‘Tom Bowling’, one of the tunesincluded in Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, written in 1905 tomark the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and still a staple of the BBC’s LastNight of the Proms. Most accounts of Dibdin’s life understandably take theautobiography as an authoritative starting point. But to recognize The ProfessionalLife as a self-conscious attempt to shape his reputation by catering to the tastes ofhis nineteenth-century audience is to suggest that there are other, earlier Dibdins towhom we also need to be introduced.The Dibdin of The Professional Life is primarily a songwriter, one born into

modest circumstances and who eschewed professional training, thereby preservinghis own innate talent and ear for melody. As Katie Osborn suggests in this volume,there are similarities between this account and the narratives of labouring-classpoets such as Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, Stephen Duck, and Anne Yearsley,who would exert a powerful influence on the development of British Romanticpoetry. This account, however, is tailored to an audience receptive to tales of thenatural genius of unschooled bards, a tale that relies on specialization. It is one thingto believe with William Wordsworth that an unschooled genius might ‘naturally’be endowed with the qualities that make it possible to express ‘the goings-on of theUniverse’, but it is another thing entirely to believe that such a person might also bea ‘naturally’ talented actor, singer, composer, theatre manager, piano player,journalist, publisher, and so on. The early-nineteenth-century conception of theindividual genius requires a degree of specialization that Dibdin’s career does notsustain. To recognize Dibdin’s achievements, then, we need to be open to adifferent model of cultural production, one that depends on two principles thatare obscured by The Professional Life: an appreciation of miscellany as an artisticallyvalid model of production, and a recognition of the social embeddedness of theproducer of the cultural artefact.

THE ART OF MISCELLANY

In The Great Transformation of Musical Taste (2008) William Weber argues that asignificant change took place in concert programming across a period that looselycorresponds to the years in which Dibdin was active. In the mid-eighteenthcentury, Weber argues, there were relatively few concerts, so that musicians andlisteners understood the need to be tolerant of a wide diversity of musical tastes—what Weber calls the collegiality of eighteenth-century musical culture. Concertprograms typically included as many as fifteen items ranging from operatic num-bers, symphonies, and concertos, to instrumental solos, string quartets, and songs.By the mid-nineteenth century a new order had come into being, characterized by




more specialized music programming, often focused on one particular composer ora single genre, with an overpowering presence of music from the past. ‘Classicalmusic’ had achieved hegemonic status, and new types of miscellaneous concerts,including ‘ballad concerts, music halls, cafés-concerts and programs of opera excerptsand songs’ were organized for the general public with only a limited relationship tothe classical concerts.19Beyond the world of concert programming that primarily concerns Weber, similar

shifts occurred in other fields of cultural production. Collections of poetry entitledMiscellany Poems, by poets such as Dryden, Finch, Mandeville, Pomfret, Pope, andWycherley, gave way to collections of poetry with increasingly specialized titles such asElegiac Sonnets (Smith),Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge andWordsworth),PoemsWritten inClose Confinement in the Tower (Thelwall), and Songs of Innocence and Experience(Blake). The pleasing juxtapositions of the early modern cabinet of curiositiesgave way to the more rigid temporal and spatial segregations of the museum, as theempiricist urge to classify and categorize took on ever wider institutional forms.Within the theatre the miscellaneous plays, pantomimes, spectacles, puppet shows,and entertainments which jostled together in the late-eighteenth-century patenttheatres gave way to a system in which Covent Garden and Drury Lane increasinglyspecialized in cultural forms that possessed high cultural capital, such as Shakespeare,which had little to do with the comic turns and entertainments of the Victorianmusic hall.20One might speculate that Dibdin’s career registers some of the pressures that

produced this partitioning of cultural forms. We can see how the transformationimpacts Dibdin’s narrative of his career, as he begins the account of his professionallife with a broad range of creative projects, many of them collaborative, and ends hiscareer claiming to be a specialist songwriter working alone at his one-man shows, orwhat he called ‘table entertainments’. But this account is highly unconvincing.Dibdin’s later years were characterized just as much by a diversity of projects(including publishing ventures, the musical textbooks, his novel writing, and hisautobiography) as his earlier work in theatres and pleasure gardens. Nevertheless,Dibdin’s narrative indicates the pressures to conform to the expectations of spe-cialization, even if this was never actualized in practice. Practically speaking, then,we can think of Dibdin’s career as an exemplary miscellany that exposes thecontradictions and dilemmas that came into being as the increasing drive towardsspecialization was experienced on an individual basis.More broadly, however, Weber’s account of the transformation in musical taste

insists that the shift in musical culture corresponds with political developments:‘The breakup of musical life took place within a context of deep instability in

19 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn toBrahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. See also Christina Bashford, The Pursuit ofHigh Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007).

20 Though see Bratton,West End Stage for an account of the wide diversity of theatrical experienceavailable in the West End in the mid-nineteenth century.




European politics and society between 1789 and 1848.’21 The transformation fromthe miscellaneous and collegial society of the late eighteenth century to a world ofincreasingly specialized concert performance in the nineteenth is thus for Weber amanifestation of broader political, social, and economic transformations that pro-duced an ‘efflorescence of utopian thinking about ideal communities or the reformof professional or cultural worlds’.22 This is not to say that the cultural transform-ations Weber observes were a direct result of, or straightforwardly analogous to,revolution—the pathways of cultural change are rarely so direct—but they arenevertheless manifestations of a period of intense re-visioning of the relationshipbetween individuals and groups, and between different communities that wereinstantiated in a variety of (sometimes contradictory) ways.In Dibdin’s case the political context for his work is crucial because he was so

frequently associated—by others, if not by himself—with political events as theywere unfolding. Most obviously, his sea songs have frequently been credited withchanging the reputation of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic conflicts, andhelping to produce a sense of unity and loyalism after the fierce political contests ofthe 1790s.23 This was a perception Dibdin himself was keen to endorse. To theextent that Dibdin’s songs effectively contributed to a more united nation, hisworks, in both print and performance, partake of the new opportunities for‘imagining’ the nation opened up by the expansion of the public sphere as describedby Benedict Anderson and Linda Colley.24 Yet Dibdin’s patriotism was far fromstraightforward; it is notable, for instance, that his sea songs are rarely explicitlypolitical, most often celebrating the manly beauty of the individual sailor, ratherthan the nation as a collective entity.Earlier, when he set up his first Sans Souci theatre at 411 Strand it was alleged that

Pitt’s administration had supported the venture in order to counteract the effect ofthe political radical John Thelwall’s lectures, which were taking place directlyopposite in the Beaufort Buildings. Dibdin himself denied this claim—as well hemight, as his first Sans Souci entertainment, ‘Private Theatricals, or Nature inNubibus’ opened in October 1791, long before Thelwall moved into the BeaufortBuildings in early 1794.25 Yet it is perhaps notable that one of the ‘large field ofobjects’ enumerated in the handbill for the first Sans Souci entertainment was ‘TheRights of Man’.26 Dibdin’s attitude towards the discourse of Rights might beglimpsed in his song ‘Bill Bobstay’, originally performed as the final song in ‘PrivateTheatricals’. Bill Bobstay is a ‘kind’ and ‘true’ sailor whose heart is generous thoughhe is ‘poor as a beggar’, and the song concludes with the following stanzas:

21 Weber, The Great Transformation, 2. 22 Ibid.23 See, for example, The Satirist 3 (1808): 239–45.24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(Revised edn, London: Verso, 2006); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (2nd edn,New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

25 For the dates of ‘Private Theatricals’, see Fahrner, 224; for Thelwall in the Beaufort Buildings, seeJudith Thompson, ‘FromForum toRepository: ACase Study inRomantic Cultural Geography’,EuropeanRomantic Review 15/2 (2004): 177–91, 179; for Dibdin’s denial, see Life, 4:6.

26 See Hawley, Chapter Six in this volume.




Why, what’s all this nonsense they talks of, and pother,About rights of man? What a plague are they at?If they mean that each man to his messmate’s a brother,Why, the lubberly swabs, ev’ry fool can tell that.

The right of us Britons we know’s to be loyal,In our country’s defence our last moments to spend,To fight up to the ears to protect the blood royal,To be true to our wives, and to succour a friend.27

The song’s gesture of dismissing the still nascent revolution debates in order toassert the ‘natural’ domestic and political loyalty inherent in a community tiedtogether by warm-hearted homosocial generosity is about as explicit a politicalstatement as Dibdin ever made, though it is notably mediated through the fictionalcharacter of the song’s speaker—a sailor who has sailed with Bill Bobstay. It is notso much that Dibdin has no political conviction as that he chooses to rechannel thepotentially volatile energies of politics into entertainment, to tackle serious issues ina light-hearted way—as much a commercial decision as a political one, no doubt,but a decision that makes explicit the politics of commerce: if one seeks a widemarket, it is wise to steer clear of controversial topics that might alienate potentialaudience members.Long before the inescapable politicization of the 1790s, Mungo, theWest Indian

character whose status rests ambiguously between that of a servant and a slave, andwhom Dibdin performed to such wide acclaim in The Padlock, played a conspicu-ous role in debates about abolition. Felicity Nussbaum argues in this volume thatDibdin had no firmly held views on abolition or slavery, but turned his represen-tation of race into a laughing matter in order to contain the threat of the potentiallychaotic and disruptive forces of slavery. Here comedy functions similarly to senti-mentality in the later table entertainments, though Dibdin’s own desire to sidestepthe politically volatile by rechannelling contentious debate into laughter and senti-ment might not always have had the desired effect on his audience. As Nussbaumpoints out, Dibdin was consistently drafted into arguments about the slave trade, nodoubt in part because he was so closely identified with Mungo. In hisMusical Tour,Dibdin distances himself from political position-taking on the question of abolition:‘it would have exceeded my duty to say whose arguments are the most worthy [of]attention’.28 Yet his audience’s response was often far less equivocal, and it is clearthat Dibdin provoked precisely the kind of political debate that he was eager to evade.Despite his attempts to the contrary, at key points in his career Dibdin’s work

flares up with political energy, exposing the interpenetration of politics and popularcommercial performance characteristic of a period when the relationship betweenthe popular and the political underwent a sustained and thoroughgoing examin-ation. Indeed, it is possible to understand the shift from the miscellaneous to thespecialized as an epiphenomenon of larger changes in attitude towards the popular,as outlined in Peter Burke’s seminal study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe,

27 Hogarth, 1:111. 28 Musical Tour, 232.




which traces the increasing polarization between the elite and popular from thesixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. In Europe in 1500, Burke argues,‘popular culture’ belonged to everyone. While the educated few had access to aseparate elite tradition, they also participated in the popular traditions of the entirepopulation. By 1800, however, the educated elite had ‘abandoned popular cultureto the lower classes, from whom they were now separated, as never before, byprofound differences in world view’.29 While the scope and chronological spansdiffer between Burke’s and Weber’s accounts, their overall arguments are neatlycompatible, both seeing a basic shift in attitudes towards the popular and anincreased specialization of cultural forms by the early nineteenth century. Thisreinforces the idea that the transformation in music programming that concernsWeber was one aspect of larger-scale developments observable also in theatre,literature, and art, for example—at all of which Dibdin tried his hand, in themidst of a rapidly shifting terrain of cultural hierarchies. Increasingly, Dibdin sawhis miscellaneous artistic endeavours becoming regarded as low or popular while hecontinued to insist on his moral and cultural legitimacy.It would, however, be a mistake to think of the transformation from miscellany to

specialization as a shift from riotous confusion to orderly classification. Miscellany isitself a form of order, requiring a robust, organized sequencing of elements. Whileto its critics (such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury) miscellany was ridiculed as a‘patchwork’, within a culture of performance that attempted to cater to the variedneeds of different audience members it could be an admirable organizing principle,and when handled with discipline and intelligence could lend a pleasing variety to aconcert programme.30 Moreover, the principle of miscellany dictated that ‘mem-bers of the musical community had to accommodate one another’s tastes and socialetiquette. All who entered a concert knew that they were expected to defer to thewishes of others to some extent.’31This might, however, be an idealized description of what actually went on at

musical gatherings. There are accounts of disagreements, complaints, and generalintolerance of the tastes of others that suggest this egalitarian public was perhaps lesswell regulated than Weber suggests.32 Furthermore, it remains unclear whether thedrive to specialization necessitated an abandonment of miscellany. In literarystudies in particular, its ongoing importance into the nineteenth century hasbeen the subject of some attention in recent years. Andrew Piper and JonathanSachs have argued for the importance of the ‘miscellaneous and non-singular’ toRomantic-period literary life.33 And David Stewart, studying early-nineteenth-

29 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), 270.30 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times,

2 vols (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 2:159.31 Weber, The Great Transformation, 16.32 See for example the disagreements at the Anacreontic Society as outlined in Ian Newman,

‘Civilizing Taste: “Sandman Joe”, the Bawdy Ballad, and Metropolitan Improvement’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 48/4 (2015): 437–56, 448.

33 Andrew Piper and Jonathan Sachs, ‘Introduction: Romantic Cultures of Print—FromMiscellaneity to Dialectic’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 57–58 (2010). doi: 10.7202/1006508ar.




century magazines, has suggested not an abandonment of the miscellaneous, but ashift from a model ‘based on the diversity of its readers’ interests’ to a ‘miscellaneitybased on the diversity of [the magazine’s] readers’.34 Rather than an abandonmentof the miscellaneous, then, the transformation in taste can be seen as a shift incultural priorities, as miscellany remains an active form of organization, but onethat becomes increasingly marginalized, operating only within restricted limits,and now measured against the growing cultural power of the specialized. In thisvolume, Jim Davis and Susan Valladares both provide accounts of the fate ofmiscellany in the generation following Dibdin, in the work of his sons Thomasand Charles the Younger respectively. Both discover that the kinds of variedentertainment for which Dibdin the Elder was known were not abandonedby his sons, but encountered greater obstacles as miscellaneous cultural formsincreasingly deviated from the kinds of artistic production to which culturalcapital was attached.All the same, it is unquestionably the case that under the regime of miscellany,

audience members encountered a much wider variety of genres and forms than wascommon under the regime of specialization. While this does not fully explain theextraordinary diversity of Dibdin’s career—his forays into new forms and differentmedia were often commercially driven, motivated as much by his fluctuating fiscalfortunes as by artistic considerations—the eighteenth-century culture of miscellanyhelps us understand the mentalities that made such variety within a single careerconceivable. Moreover, the orientation of the miscellaneous to accommodating awide variety of tastes had important consequences for the way eighteenth-centuryartists conceived of the communities to which they belonged.

DIBDIN ’S NETWORKS

We have suggested the need to resist the narrative of specialization in TheProfessional Life, in so far as it charts the evolution of Dibdin from a jack-of-all-trades to a professionalized songwriter. In the light of his late prose works—thenovels, the Musical Mentor, the accounts of his tours, and The Professional Lifeitself—the trajectory of Dibdin’s increased specialization is hard to sustain. Butthe parallel narrative arc of socially embedded collegiality transforming intoindividual, self-sustaining performance has at first glance a much greater ring oftruth. Dibdin’s early career is marked by a series of fruitful collaborations, mostfamously his productive writing partnership with Isaac Bickerstaff, which produceda series of comic operas including Love in the City (1767), The Padlock (1768),Lionel and Clarissa (1768), The Captive (1769), The Ephesian Matron (1769), TheRecruiting Sarjeant (1770), He Would If He Cou’d (1771), and The Sultan; or,A Peep into the Seraglio (1775). This highly fruitful collaboration was aborted in

34 David Stewart, Romantic Magazines andMetropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke andNew York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19.




1772, when Bickerstaff fled to France in order to escape a charge of sodomy, at thetime a capital offence.35After the association with Bickerstaff ended, Dibdin began to take sole respon-

sibility for both the music and librettos to his works, but the theatre was aninherently collaborative medium, and getting his works performed involved main-taining relationships with a wide variety of theatre managers, actors, musicians, andperformers—something that Dibdin found notoriously difficult. Bickerstaff andDibdin’s early works were performed at Covent Garden, where he worked withJohn Beard and George Colman, but after a dispute with Colman in 1768 Dibdinsigned a seven-year agreement with David Garrick at Drury Lane, while simultan-eously under contract to produce works for Ranelagh Gardens. At the end of theseven-year arrangement Dibdin moved on again, taking his opera The Waterman(1774) to Samuel Foote’s Haymarket Theatre and writing a puppet play, TheComic Mirror, which included an attack on Garrick. After a two-year period inFrance, Dibdin returned to London and produced short pieces and harlequinadesfor both Foote at the Haymarket and Thomas Harris at Covent Garden, and wroteregularly for Thomas King at Sadler’s Wells. But his relationships with the theatremanagers were getting increasingly strained, so Dibdin came up with a plan to‘throw off [the] leading strings’ of the major theatres and set up on his own.36 Theresult was the extraordinary Royal Circus, discussed by Michael Burden in ChapterThree. This was a complex multimedia operation, capitalizing on the popularityof Astley’s equestrian events, and combining feats of horsemanship with someof the operas that Dibdin had written for Thomas Harris, and a children’s theatre,intended to train young actors for the stage. It required Dibdin to obtain the leaseon the land near Blackfriars Bridge, to build a suitable theatre, to hire teachersand singing and dancing instructors, and to oversee the education and board of thesixty children who enrolled in the school. It also required Dibdin to collaboratewith Charles Hughes, a ‘strong man’ who had previously worked with Astley andwas in charge of the equestrian entertainments, and Giuseppe Grimaldi, fatherof the famous clown Joseph, a well-known harlequin in his own right, who wasput in charge of the dancing. After a successful first season in 1782, the Circusfailed, in part because of disputes over licensing, precipitated, Burden suggests, bythe inability of the proprietors to work together in a venture that demandedcollaboration.37 In The Professional Life, Dibdin claims that the Circus ‘was thechild of my own fancy. I projected it; I fabricated it; I supplied it with materials’.38It is thus an important transition from the collaborative (or, in Dibdin’s view,despotic) theatrical world he had previously inhabited to the more independent

35 The Sultan was acquired by the actress Fanny Abingdon, who was in correspondence withBickerstaff while he was in exile and brought it to Drury Lane with the help of Garrick. See JudithMilhous and Robert D. Hume, ‘Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Copyrights—and a Biographical Discovery’,Philological Quarterly 83/3 (2004): 259–73.

36 Life, 2:103.37 Burden’s account challenges Burwick’s suggestion that the ribald nature of Dibdin’s burlettas

precipitated the licensing problems. See Burwick Playing to the Crowd, 14, 176–8.38 Life, 2:115.




projects he pursued thereafter. It is clear, however, that this child of Dibdin’s fancyrequired a great deal of intensive collaborative work, not only with the ‘the leech,HUGHES’ and ‘the serpent, GRIMALDI’,39 as he calls them in The Professional Life, butwith magistrates, proprietors, architects, builders, actors, educators, and children.Even in his later, more self-sustaining ventures, such as the Sans Souci, his

journalism, novel-writing, and publishing ventures, the process of bringing hisoriginal concept to fruition would require much help and assistance. We catch aglimpse of this in a case that was brought before the Public Office in Bow-Street inOctober 1792, which Dibdin attended ‘with several persons employed by him’ atthe Sans Souci. The case involved a street brawl which took place between Dibdin’semployees and the employees of the wine merchant next door, after the contents ofa tub of water that had been used for cleaning bottles were discharged onto the headof Dibdin’s wife. An argument ensued, leading to personal abuse, which endedwith ‘an attack on Mr. Dibdin’s people, some of whom were severely cut in theface’.40 The report does not mention what the assigned tasks of each of Dibdin’speople were, and it is vague about numbers, but it is clear that Dibdin’s soloperformance required a significant staff, a fact that he erases from the record of his‘one-man’ triumphs in The Professional Life.41As well as these professional collaborations, the orientation of Dibdin’s writing is

always outwards, always turned towards his audience, anticipating and compensat-ing for his own fame, notoriety, and reputation. Despite his chronological overlapwith the development of literary Romanticism, his sensibility is quite distinct fromthe creative genius who might seek inspiration or solace from lyrical contemplation;Dibdin is, by contrast, constantly aware of himself as part of a dynamic socialsystem, and thoroughly embedded within its workings.The social worlds to which Dibdin belonged might be glimpsed by considering

Dibdin’s relationship with Garrick in more detail. In The Professional Life, Dibdinpresents Garrick as stifling, keeping him busy with projects that would never see thelight of day in order to prevent him writing for his rivals. Yet it is clear that for atime Dibdin and Garrick were very close. Garrick was godfather to Dibdin’sillegitimate son, Thomas John Dibdin, whose mother was Harriet Pitt, a dancerand actress who worked at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Garrick gaveThomas Dibdin his stage debut at the age of four, when he played Cupid alongsideSarah Siddons’s Venus in Garrick’s Jubilee—a play originally written in 1769 tomark the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s birth and part of a festival of bardolatryspearheaded by Garrick, for which Dibdin wrote much of the music. This was adensely networked theatrical and artistic world, where the duopoly of the patenttheatres guaranteed a circumscribed number of artists and performers whoseconnections with one another might range across personal and professional domainsof experience—exposing the difficulties inherent in Dibdin’s attempt to separateout his ‘professional life’. These networks might quickly be expanded outwards

39 Ibid., 2:111. 40 Diary or Woodfall’s Register (19 October 1792).41 For a separate incident suggestive of the roles that Dibdin’s wife and daughter played at the Sans

Souci, see Fahrner, 147.




beyond obvious members of the theatrical world to include a much wider sphere ofcultural production. Dibdin makes a cameo appearance in Boswell’s Life of Johnson,when he writes the music to a song, ‘A Matrimonial Thought’, ‘which Mr. Garrickhad a few days before procured to be set to music by the very ingeniousMr. Dibdin’.42 Garrick was, of course, a close friend and confidante of Johnsonand a member of his literary club, whose highly select membership consisted ofgreat men from the world of art, politics, and the theatre, including EdmundBurke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds. While Dibdin did not possesssufficient cultural capital to be invited to join such an elite group of tastemakers, heoccupied a position immediately proximate to it through his professional connectionand friendship with Garrick.A salient comparison might be with Charles Burney. Unlike Dibdin, who always

remained at the fringes of cultural legitimacy, Burney was able to gain direct accessto Johnson’s immediate circle. Like Dibdin, Burney was another musician ofhumble origins who had risen rapidly in the public’s estimation and in social statusthrough a combination of astute networking and ambitious publication projects.The celebrated success of Burney’s four-volume History of Music (1776–89) maywell have been the chief inspiration for Dibdin’s five-volume Complete History of theEnglish Stage (1800), while Burney’s accounts of his musical tours through Europebear distinct parallels to Dibdin’s The Musical Tour of Mr Dibdin (1788) andObservations on a Tour (1801–2). Burney represented the new possibilities openedup by the expansion of eighteenth-century print culture for individuals to achievefame and status through publication—opportunities that Dibdin also seemedkeen to exploit. Ultimately, however, Burney’s success proved more solid, securednotably through institutional recognition (Burney was awarded a doctorate inMusic by the University of Oxford in 1769 and became a fellow of the RoyalSociety in 1773)—whereas Dibdin claimed, in a turn of phrase that was perhapsdeliberately ambiguous, to have declined an offer from Professor of Music PhilipHayes to take a doctorate at Oxford.43 Dibdin’s failure to achieve institutionalrecognition may be another indicator of the shifting relationship between specialistand miscellaneous cultural production, highlighted also by Dibdin’s peripheralrelationship with the Johnson circle: for each of the tastemakers that gatheredaround Johnson at the Streatham home of Hester Thrale—including Burney—hadachieved distinction in a particular specialized field of cultural production. Dibdin,firmly attached through financial necessity to the miscellaneous means of operatingin the commercial entertainment world, could not fit easily into the more specialistmodel of the Streatham set. Always at the periphery of the kinds of culturalauthority Burney was able to acquire, an anxiety over the precariousness of fameand his own social status became a continual leitmotif of Dibdin’s writing andcareer strategies.

42 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1980), 430.

43 Musical Tour, 60.




At the other end of the social spectrum, Dibdin’s popularity might be judged byhis remarkably strong presence in the more often anonymous song slips andbroadsides sold by ballad singers. The Bodleian’s Broadside Ballads Online, forexample, lists 324 sheets with Dibdin songs, (compared with six by Braham, elevenby Colman the Younger, eight by Hook, one by Shield, and two by Storace,probably the next-best-known songwriters of the day). Some of these are duplicates,but it would also be surprising if there were not many other songs by Dibdin in thiscollection that have not been attributed. These texts are notoriously difficult todate; nevertheless, it is clear that even those songs written much earlier appear asbroadside ballads only occasionally before 1790, though they gain in popularitythroughout the 1790s—as Harriet Guest describes in Chapter Eight—and into thenineteenth century. It should be acknowledged that the Bodleian broadsides, thelargest collection of such material currently available, is particularly strong inballads printed by Pitts, Catnach, and Jennings in the 1790s–1820s, and relativelyweak in holdings from the mid-eighteenth century, potentially accounting for thestrong presence of Dibdin towards the end of his career. Yet the collection’sevidence corroborates Francis Place’s assertion that Dibdin’s sea songs wereamong those loyalist ballads that replaced bawdy and potentially seditious balladryin London streets after the French Revolution.44 The popularity of Dibdin’s songs inthis period is further suggested by the categorization of the three-volume UniversalSongster, a publishing phenomenon of 1825–6, according to which songs werevariously ‘Amatory’, ‘Bacchanalian’, ‘Sporting’, and so on—or ‘Dibdins’, a singlingout accorded to no other writer.45 The larger number of Dibdin songs in theBodleian ballad collection towards the end of Dibdin’s career also coincides withDibdin’s reinvention of himself as primarily a writer of songs in a popular vein, ratherthan as an actor, operatic composer, or theatre manager and impresario.Dibdin’s songs were printed without his permission by all of the important

London and regional ballad printers of the early nineteenth century, adding nodoubt to Dibdin’s frustration that he was not adequately remunerated for hissongwriting efforts, despite their widespread popularity from the elite membershipof Johnson’s club to the street singers of popular tradition. Furthermore, in spite ofthe narrative of specialization and segregation suggested by Burke and Weber,Dibdin provides evidence of a popular songwriter and performer whose work wasknown and cherished simultaneously by elite tastemakers and street musicians wellinto the nineteenth century.In addition to broadside ballads, Dibdin’s songs, as Guest discusses, were repro-

duced in other, more expensive formats, such as the large quarto sheets produced byLaurie and Whittle (best known for their maps and charts), and Samuel WilliamFores (known for publishing visual satires by Gillray and Rowlandson).46 Here

44 BL Add. MSS 27825 fo. 141. Francis Place, ‘Collections relating to Manners and Morals’, vol. 1,part B ‘Specimens of Songs Sung About the Streets of London’. See Cox Jensen, Chapter Seven in thisvolume.

45 George and Robert Cruikshank, The Universal Songster, or, Museum of Mirth: forming the MostComplete, Extensive, and Valuable Collection of Ancient and Modern Songs, 3 vols (London, 1825–6).

46 See Harriet Guest, Chapter Eight in this volume.




Dibdin’s words would take up half of a large sheet, with often beautifully coloureddecorative engravings occupying the other half. While the songs themselves are oftenthe same as those reproduced in song slips, Fores and Laurie andWhittle catered to avery different clientele.Taking these song sheets as evidence, we can trace Dibdin’s networks among

those places where his works appeared and where they were known. Dibdin’snetworks might move beyond the professional relationships he evidently hadamong the theatrical world and concert-going crowd, and might be expanded toinclude the hawkers who performed his songs in public, the men and women whowould hum his tunes as they went about their daily routines, the publishers andprinters of his songs (posthumously or otherwise), such as Catnach, Pitts, JohnMarshall of Newcastle, Fores, and Laurie and Whittle, and the engravers such asIsaac and George Cruikshank, who illustrated Dibdin’s works for Laurie andWhittle; and even, as Nicholas Grindle suggests in Interlude Three, to artistssuch as George Morland, who produced fine-art paintings taking inspirationfrom Dibdin’s songs.In this volume we regard Dibdin as a hub around which the moving parts of late

Georgian cultural production revolved. In the following pages we encounter a widerange of performance spaces and print venues ranging from the theatres at DruryLane and Covent Garden, through Ranelagh Gardens, Sadler’s Wells, and the RoyalCircus, to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadsideballads and graphic satires to newspaper journalism, mezzotint engravings, painting,and decorative pottery. Dibdin’s importance lies in his ability to make visible theconnections between various kinds of cultural production; he provides a model forthinking about the machinery of late Georgian culture as a system of interconnectedparts, reliant upon one another, and moving, if not in perfect synchrony like well-oiled clockwork, at least with an awareness of movements in other, seemingly distantparts of the same complexly networked mechanism.This book is intended to shed light on the various aspects of the machinery of

late Georgian culture and the connections between them. It is divided into threeparts, interspersed with ‘interludes’—shorter informative pieces that draw oninformation presented in the full-length chapters but expand our perspective innew, suggestive directions. The first part, ‘Dibdin in Context’, attempts to unshackleDibdin from his Victorian refashioning and place him back into the eighteenth-century environments within which he worked. This begins in Chapter Two withFelicity Nussbaum’s analysis of Dibdin’s representations of race, ranging from hiscelebrated blackface performances as Mungo in The Padlock (1768) to his orientalentertainments The Seraglio (1776) and The Magic of Orosmanes (1785). Nussbaumconsiders what it means to turn the serious subject of slavery into light-heartedentertainment. In Chapter Three Michael Burden discusses one of Dibdin’smore extraordinary ventures, the Royal Circus, which opened in 1782. Burdensuggests that many of the artistic decisions of running a miscellaneous theatreof this kind can be attributed to the need to distinguish oneself from thecompetition, especially in the case of the Royal Circus from Philip Astley’shugely successful equestrian entertainments. In our first interlude Katie




Osborn discusses the connection between the worlds of song and poetry,situating Dibdin alongside rural labouring-class poets, with particular emphasison Robert Bloomfield. Osborn interrogates the intersection of metropolis andcountryside by locating these two writers’ texts within their working practices,their music, and their engagement with particular London audiences, andprovides a reading of the rustic and the citizen that is knowing, even-handed,and modern.Dibdin’s work as a journalist is the subject of Chapter Four. David O’Shaughnessy

provides a detailed assessment of the symbiotic relationship of the theatre andnewspaper publishing in the 1780s, arguing that in his newspaper The DevilDibdin accused both theatres and newspapers of abandoning their responsibilitiesto the public sphere in favour of mutually beneficial profits. O’Shaughnessy’ssituating of this periodical literature within both a political climate and a metro-politan sphere of sociability enriches our understanding of the interrelation ofnetworks, individuals, and issues operating on and within the entangled world ofpress and theatre.The 1790s was the decade in which Dibdin achieved his greatest commercial

success with his solo entertainments held at his Sans Souci theatres. But as DavidKennerley shows in Chapter Five, commercial success came with its own drawbacksas the press began to accuse Dibdin of plagiarizing from his former collaborator IsaacBickerstaff. Kennerley discusses the series of libel trials that ensued, exposing thepronounced effect of celebrity upon both contemporary theatrical and politicalculture, and reassesses Dibdin’s widely influential brand of loyalism in this mostturbulent decade in British politics. In Chapter Six Judith Hawley discusses the ragefor private theatricals after which Dibdin named his first Sans Souci show. Hawleysheds light on the cross-class craze for private theatricals by bringing them intodialogue with the world of the professional theatre through Dibdin, showing howthe faux-‘private’ actions of both Dibdin and amateur dramatics reflected theirrevocable destabilization of the patent theatres’ monopoly on spoken drama. Ourfirst part concludes with Nicola Pritchard-Pink’s interlude, which extends thisconsideration of Dibdin’s intersection with realms of amateur performance byconsidering Jane Austen’s music collection, in which Dibdin’s songs feature prom-inently. These, with their bawdy comedy, political, and social satire, and martial,masculine themes, are far removed from the musical diet prescribed for young ladiesof Austen’s rank by conduct writers, including Dibdin himself in theMusical Mentor.Pritchard-Pink presents domestic musical performance as a means by which womencould express themselves and participate in the world beyond the bounds of home,family, and conduct-book femininity.Without abandoning the contextual work offered in the first part, Part Two,

‘Songs in Focus’, shifts the attention towards discussions of particular songs. InChapter Seven Oskar Cox Jensen discusses ‘True Courage’, from its 1798 com-position to calls for its revival in 1900, taking in its performance, reception,dissemination, appropriation, and reinvention. A close musical and lyrical readingis tied to those chronological contexts, and informed by the views and culturalpractices of those involved—Dibdin, other singers, audiences, and later interpreters




of ‘True Courage’—shedding new light on the mentalities and habits of its day.In Chapter Eight Harriet Guest similarly takes a single song, here Dibdin’s‘A Voyage to Margate’, better known as ‘The Margate Hoy’, and examines itssocial resonances, but with an emphasis less on its performances than its printhistory. Guest’s chapter provides a fascinating study of the mutually reinforcingdomains of song and visual culture, from slip songs and street ballads, throughgraphic satire and finely produced drolls, to aspirational mezzotint engravingsbased on oil paintings by George Morland. Developing one aspect of Guest’sargument, in our third interlude Nicholas Grindle examines in greater detail therelationship between Dibdin, Morland, and John Raphael Smith, who publishednumerous luxury prints based on Dibdin’s songs. Grindle considers the implica-tions of the appropriation of a popular musical tradition by the world of fine art,and provides a compelling account of the overlapping worlds of visual culture,the theatre, and musical entertainment by examining the clubs and societies inwhich their leading figures mingled.The final part of the volume considers Dibdin’s legacies in the nineteenth

century, initially by examining the work of his two sons, Charles Isaac MungoDibdin and Thomas Dibdin. In Chapter Nine Susan Valladares considers the fate ofthe miscellaneous or mixed medley performance in Charles Dibdin the Younger’sSadler’s Wells theatre after 1814, and compares it to his poetic romance, Young Arthur(1819), which, while enthusiastically received by some, was too much of a ‘medley’ tosatisfy others. Dibdin’s younger son Thomas is the subject of Chapter Ten, in whichJim Davis reveals both change and continuity in expectations of dramatic authorshipand theatrical practice in the early nineteenth century. Davis explores the collaborativenature of Thomas Dibdin’s writing, arguing that his scripts were not finished literarytexts, but raw materials designed to be fully realized only in performance, as celebratedactors brought their own creative contributions to their roles to suit their stagepersonas. Yet, at the same time, the gathering forces of specialization and the privil-eging of the author as the hallmarks of legitimate cultural authority were beginning tocreate new hierarchies of theatrical production, genres, and styles, highlighting thecontrasts between the era of Dibdin the Elder and that of his sons. The volumeconcludes with a reassessment of perhaps the most familiar Dibdin, the writer ofsentimental sea songs who was beloved throughout the nineteenth century. Focusingon Dibdin’s posthumous reception, Isaac Land examines the moral and rhetoricaldifficulties of repackaging Dibdin’s works for a Victorian sensibility. He explores thespecifics of mid-century concert culture previously highlighted by Weber and DerekScott as central to changes in nineteenth-century taste and programming, and con-siders the way nostalgia reveals the relationship between new naval technologies andthe songs, people, and language of a remembered Napoleonic ‘golden age’—to whichDibdin proves to have been central in the Victorian imagination.Individually, these chapters contribute valuable knowledge and analysis of

Dibdin’s life, work, and reputation. Collectively, in the connections between thechapters, they offer something much more: insight into the capacious nature of lateGeorgian culture, in which a song can resonate across boundaries of class andgender; where a performance can begin on the stage of Covent Garden then insert




itself into heated debates about the slave trade decades later; and where a singleindividual can be an actor and composer in the morning, a journalist in theafternoon, a novelist in the evening, and the saviour of the Royal Navy after dinner.To acknowledge the connections between the wide-ranging and often dissimilarresonances of Dibdin’s miscellaneous career is not to argue for a totalizing theory oflate Georgian culture, but to recognize the necessity of an interdisciplinary approachto cultural production; one that does not eschew disciplinary expertise, but is aware ofthe blind spots of specialization, and mines these for what they can reveal about thoseareas that fall beyond our usual disciplinary limits. This volume, then, represents acollaborative study, gathering together experts in the fields of art, history, literature,music, and theatre, who have worked together in a coordinated attempt to map out acomplex terrain of cultural production whose contours could not adequately begrasped from within a single discipline. Part of the reason that Dibdin has so longbeen overlooked is precisely because of the larger cultural movement towardsspecialization that began in his day and which continues to shape our currentacademic environment, a regime of specialization which no doubt has considerablebenefits, but which also has limitations. After several decades in which the call tointerdisciplinarity has become commonplace, the time is ripe to offer a fullerconsideration of Dibdin’s varied practice and to recognize the challenges the art ofmiscellany poses to our modes of enquiry.



Comp. by: C. Vijayakumar Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 0003304478 Date:9/10/17Time:13:33:12 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003304478.3DDictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 21

PART I

DIBDIN IN CONTEXT



2‘Mungo Here, Mungo There’Charles Dibdin and Racial Performance

Felicity Nussbaum

Slavery in its many forms is ubiquitous in Charles Dibdin’s later-eighteenth-century musical entertainments. The Padlock (1768), in which Dibdin played thestarring role as the blackface house servant Mungo, is the most notable, but amongthe other comic musical dramas he contributed to as playwright and/or composer areThe Captive (1769), The Sultan, Or, A Peep into the Seraglio (1775), The BlackamoorWash’d White (1776), The Seraglio (1776), and The Magic of Orosmanes; Or, Harle-quin Slave and Sultan: A Pantomime, Drawn from the Arabian Legends (1785). ForDibdin, captivity, servitude, and chattel slavery become laughing matters as thevictims rail against their lack of freedom with ludic dialogue and catchy tunes.Incorporating the musical score into discussion of the printed texts of these entertain-ments makes analysing their performances richer, yet also more complicated. Dibdin’sapparently innocuous popular entertainments are designed, I argue here, to reflectwithout resolving the tensions surrounding national issues of slavery, social class,and imperial expansion that troubled Britain’s image of itself as the bastion of libertyand equality.Though several blackface comic characters, often sans dialogue, appear earlier

in the century, Charles Dibdin was the first British actor to play a fully developedcomic blackface role impersonating an Afro-Caribbean slave in Isaac Bickerstaff ’sThe Padlock, derived from Miguel de Cervantes’ El celoso extremeño or ‘The JealousHusband’ (1613), set in Salamanca. The wildly popular role became virtuallyidentical with Dibdin, for he not only starred in the play but also composed themusic: both the overture and piano reduction of the entire score are extant.1 Theadvertisement, uniting the cause of African slaves with European women, notesthe play’s inspiration from Matthew Prior’s poem ‘An English Padlock’ (1705) inwhich the only fool-proof padlock is the one clamped on a woman’s mind. Anotheradaptation of Cervantes’ tale, Eliza Haywood’s The Padlock: Or No GuardWithout Virtue (1728), features a lame, blind, and deformed black slave as a

1 Though Garrick received £1,700 for The Padlock, Dibdin claims he was given only £45. In Life,1:71, he writes, ‘In thirteen years, nearly three sets of the Padlock had been worn out. I made a set ofplates, at this time, take off about three thousand five hundred impressions; so that an estimate may beeasily made of the immense profit it yielded.’



young wife’s adulterous lover.2 Haywood reimagines the implications of Prior’spoem for she enjoins men ‘to rule rather by Choice than Compulsion’. Applyingthe poem to the play, Bickerstaff transformed Cervantes’ black eunuch into theblackface Mungo, extending the allusion to the lock on a slave’s collar. It is worthnoting that The Padlock debuted about six months after the 27 March 1768Montserrat slave rebellion, which may have triggered fears of insurrection.3Dibdin joined the Drury Lane theatre corps and brought playwright Bickerstaff

along with him. Their collaboration, The Padlock, is an opera buffa, a send-up ofserious opera. The light comic form was probably transported from Naples toEngland in the late Restoration and early eighteenth century, perhaps via Frenchopéra comique.4 From 1766 to 1772 the number of opera buffa performances inLondon outpaced those of opera seria by three to one.5 The evening’s entertainmentincluded a main-piece along with the comic opera. The one- or two-act comicoperas represent the ordinary people at their centre as risible. The libretto anddialogue are mundane, sometimes vulgar, and frequently peppered with dialect andcolloquialisms. The Padlock features an attractive young soprano lead, her ardentsuitor who sings tenor, a baritone outsider, Mungo, who offers ironic commentary,and a comic bass who often intones ludicrous rapid-fire nonsense. The impedimentto the union of the young lovers is happily resolved in the ensemble’s rousing finale.The Padlock premiered on 3 October 1768 and enjoyed fifty-four performances,

followed by more than a hundred stagings over the next three years: from 1768 to1776, performances numbered 142 at Drury Lane and seventy at Covent Garden.6Its frequent productions in England extended into the next century when IraAldridge, the first black actor on the British stage, renewed the popularity ofMungo with a sympathetic portrayal of the role. In America, twenty-six knownperformances took place in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, from 29 May1769 until the theatres closed in 1774 in anticipation of the American War. In thelate eighteenth century The Padlock was the most regularly performed afterpiece inMontego Bay and Kingston, Jamaica;7 it played in St Petersburg (1771) andVienna (1853), and in parts of the British Empire including Madras (1788),

2 Haywood’s novella recalls the frame tale of The Arabian Nights (English translation as Arabiannights entertainments, London, 1707–17). See also Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British SeductionStories and the Problem of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 243–7.

3 Prithi Kanakamedala, ‘Staging Atlantic Slavery’, in Swindells and Taylor, Handbook of theGeorgian Theatre, 673, mentions the Montserrat rebellion.

4 After Goldoni and Galuppi’s Il filosofo di campagna (1761), opera buffa became a part of everyseason, according to Michael Burden, ‘Opera in the London Theatres’ in Moody and O’Quinn,Companion to the Theatre, 211.

5 Ian Woodfield, Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick, andthe Business of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 77–8.

6 Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1986), 352; John R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-slavery: The Mobilisation of PublicOpinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); JohnR. Oldfield, ‘ “The Soft Ties of Humanity”: Slavery and Race in British Drama, 1760–1800’,Huntington Library Quarterly 56/1 (1993): 1–14, 9.

7 Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage 1655–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 79.The Padlockwas performed at least ten times between 1777 and 1813 along with a comedy or tragedy andafterpiece.

Felicity Nussbaum24



Calcutta (1789), Cape Town (1815), and Bombay (1820).8 In addition it wasadapted into a popular marionette and puppet show performed at local fairs.In The Padlock’s plot the wealthy sixty-year-old Don Diego awards the impov-

erished family of his young fiancée Leonora 4,000 pistoles in exchange for herhand.9 He fears, however, that the captive ingénue will be unfaithful. Don Diego’sopening song ridiculously parodies Hamlet’s soliloquy: ‘Thoughts to council—letme see— / Hum—to be, or not to be / A husband, is the question. A cuckold! Mustthat follow?’ (1.1). By the second verse the old man decides that padlocking thehouse during his absence will ensure her virginity (though she has earlier rendez-voused with a disguised Leander at Mass), and he sets off to arrange the nuptials. Anallegro tempo suits his frenzied worry about being cuckolded, and he rushes off to apresto accompaniment.The West Indian servant Mungo and the old maid Ursula are entrusted with the

keys to Don Diego’s home, though not the crucial padlock key, during his visit toLeonora’s parents. The beleaguered Mungo, with whom the knowing audiencesympathizes, boldly insults his master and points out the inequities of slavery.Mungo’s blackface burlesque performances, from the original Padlock through tothe abolitionist epilogue added in the 1780s, mediated the concept of England asboth ‘a white metropole and abolitionist empire of liberty’, as Jenna Gibbs haspointed out.10 As with any caricature, however, the Mungo character has fracturedmeanings. The songs follow James Beattie’s description of caricature in his ‘Essayon Laughter’ (1776) in provoking laughter because of the ‘uncommon mixture ofrelation and contrariety, exhibited, or supposed to be united, in the same assem-blage’.11 As both servant and slave, Mungo is humanized as a suffering servant butmocked and beaten because he distorts the language, is alleged to be lazy, andcontests Don Diego’s authority.A range of readers have argued that popular entertainments such as harlequin-

ades promoted the abolitionist cause, though Jeffrey Cox has aptly noted thatMungo is both ‘the butt of the farce’ and a sympathetic voice of resistance,especially later in the century.12 But the much-caricatured character enables fluidresponses towards slavery depending upon the time, place, and circumstances of itsrepresentation. On the one hand, Dibdin’s depictions may be understood toprovoke laughter that diffuses the institution’s potential disruptive threat. At the

8 Tasch, The Dramatic Cobbler, 159.9 Isaac Bickerstaff, The Padlock. A Comic Opera (London, 1768). All subsequent citations are to act

and scene in this edition.10 Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theatre, and Popular Culture in

London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 63.11 James Beattie, Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and

Scepticism, 2 vols (Dublin, 1778), 2:399.12 David Worrall, Harlequin Empire; Race, Ethnicity, and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment

(London: Pickering&Chatto, 2007); KathleenWilson, ‘Blackface Empire: Love, Theft, and Subversionin BritishDomains’, in KathleenWilson, Strolling Players of Empire: Theater, Culture andModernity in theBritish Provinces, 1720–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.),Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation:Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Pickering&Chatto, 1999–), 5:xv.

25‘Mungo Here, Mungo There’



same time, the actor/composer may well have been pursuing a savvy commercialstrategy in playing both sides of the debate and allowing his representations toresonate with audiences who held unformed or unsettled opinions.The caricatured language of Mungo, whose status rests somewhere between

servant and slave, is believed to be the earliest attempt to represent West Indiandialect on the British stage.13 Dibdin claims that he first created the role of Mungofor the Irish actor and singer John Moody, who brought Negro dialect, as it wascalled, from his West Indian travels. Moody’s triumph as the black servant Lovel inthe non-musical farce High Life Below Stairs (1759) made him seem the likelycandidate to play Mungo, but Dibdin eventually won the coveted singing part andperformed it with enormous success.14 Dibdin signalled the importance of thecharacter to his career when he named his son, born in the year The Padlockdebuted, Charles Isaac Mungo.15 The name itself may be an example of black,regional, and rural dialects, for the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that ‘mungo’ may be a slurring of the phrase ‘must go’.16As noted above, blackface impersonation in eighteenth-century opera and dance

was not without precedent. Musical performance mixed with parodied or mangledlanguage was part of early musica ebraica, which in turn reveals connections to themoresca repertory in Moorish costume of Renaissance pantomime, song, anddance.17 Players used burnt cork or carmine to darken their faces.18 Blackenedcharacters represented African Moors from the sixteenth century onwards inEuropean operas, ballets, masques, and pageants.19 Olivia Bloechl directs ourattention to the way early music mediated racial fantasies and later undergirdedmore fixed, racially marked representations in opera and dance.20 Dibdin’s Mungo,

13 Fahrner, 57. See also Richard Walser, ‘Negro Dialect in Eighteenth-Century American Drama’,American Speech 30/4 (1955): 269–76.

14 See Life, 1:70. Fiske, English Theatre Music, 352–3. Dibdin allegedly made the part too taxing forthe Irish actor and singer John Moody, and for Dodd who was next offered the role. Only the overturesurvives from the original orchestral scoring.

15 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 348–53. Dibdin’s son was one of two illegitimate children resultingfrom his union with Harriet Pitt, a pantomime dancer.

16 See Carlson, ‘New Lows’. According to the OED, ‘mungo’ also describes variously a root plant, amongoose, or a dog.

17 Emily Wilbourne, ‘Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance, and theEloquence of the Body’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 63/1 (2010): 1–43. Morescasimilarly mixes parodied language with song and dance, 22.

18 Thomas Leman Rede, The Road to the Stage, or the Performer’s Preceptor (London, 1827), 38–9,writes, ‘To produce the black necessary for the negro face of Hassan, Wouski, Mungo, or Sambo, theperformer should cover the face, neck, and hands with a thin coat of pomatum, or what is better,though more disagreeable, of lard; then burn a cork to powder, wet it with beer (which will fix thecolouring matter), and apply it with a hare’s foot, or a cloth . . .A strong colouring of carmine should belaid upon the face after the black, as otherwise the expression of countenance and eye will be destroyed.’

19 In early forms of ballet, the pantomime dancer wears blackface. Ignatius Sancho titles a set ofdances he composes ‘Mungo’s Delight’, an obvious allusion to The Padlock. See Jane Girdham, ‘BlackMusicians in England: Ignatius Sancho and his Contemporaries’, in Reyahn King et al. (eds), IgnatiusSancho: An African Man of Letters (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 115–24.

20 Olivia Bloechl, ‘Race, Empire, and Early Music’, in Olivia Bloechl, Jeffrey Kallberg, and MelanieLowe (eds), Rethinking Difference in Musical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2015), 77, 82.

Felicity Nussbaum26



then, drew upon a history of racial impersonation, although his rendering wasextraordinarily novel in its broad appeal.Blackface at its nascent moment intersects with pantomime in ways that have not

yet been thoroughly traced, though both its relation to commedia dell’arte and thepresence of blackface in ballet have been noted.21 Pantomime’s Harlequin, per-forming most often in half-face black mask, is granted carnivalesque, anarchic, andtrickster traits as lord of misrule in a world of slapstick, double entendres, and broadsatire. Such a character embraced the mysterious or alien but also tamed it throughmagic or childlike innocence.22Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out that English harlequinades from 1783 to

1870 ‘contain figures of the black as Harlequin [that] combine both blackness andminstrelsy’, a connection that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century and isconfirmed a century later (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).23 Like the early harlequincharacter that John O’Brien has analysed, Bickerstaff ’s Mungo represented ‘thecommon folk—playful and mischievous, occasionally a petty criminal, articulatingdesires through the body rather than by speech’, though the speaking and singingMungo differed importantly from the mute harlequin.24Like the harlequin, the basso novo of ballad opera sometimes accompanied

himself on lute or guitar, but in Bickerstaff ’s Padlock, the hero Leander displayshis talents on the guitar and teaches Mungo how to play the instrument.In The Padlock Mungo debuts onstage carrying a hamper and cursing his master

for treating him like an animal. In his most famous song, laced with irony, hecomplains of having to seem grateful even as he heeds his master’s every beck and call:

Dear heart, what a terrible life am I led,A dog has a better life that’s shelter’d and fed:Night and day ’tis de same,My pain is dere game;Me wish to de Lord me was dead (1.6).

The shadow of Shakespeare’s Othello hovers over The Padlock here and elsewhere.Dibdin’s lyrics in this popular song echo those of Roderigo, the Venetian rivalsuitor for Desdemona, in his description of Othello as a wandering stranger, thus

21 Marian Hannah Winter, The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London, 1974), 81 n.46, cited in ElizabethMiller Lewis, ‘Hester Santlow’s Harlequine: Dance, Dress, Status, and Gender on the London Stage,1706–1734’, in Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (eds), The Clothes That Wear Us (Newark:University of Delaware Press, 1999), 90–101.

22 Bent Holm, ‘Harlequin, Holberg and the (In)visible Masks: Commedia dell’arte in Eighteenth-Century Denmark’, Theatre Research International 23/2 (1998): 159–66.

23 In several harlequinades a black slave, transformed into Harlequin, is freed when he marriesColumbine, the master’s daughter. Henry Louis Gates Jr, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 51–8, maintains that the Harlequin’sdomino presence eventually split into the two central figures of minstrelsy, black and white, Tamboand Bones. The Harlequin’s black mask, shaved head, and artificial phallus (later reduced to a sword ormagic wand) intimate his origins as an African slave. Harlequin’s dress was sometimes patched rags orgeometric shapes.

24 John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 132.




lending Mungo’s words a hint of danger; a parallel innuendo about the threat thatthe minstrel Leander—also a wanderer and with claims to have been a slave—posesto Leonora may also be implied. Here are Roderigo’s lines about the tragic mixed-race couple in Othello:

Your daughter, if you have not given her leave,I say again hath made a gross revolt,Tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunesIn an extravagant and wheeling strangerOf here and everywhere.25

Figure 2.1. William West, West’s New Plate of Harlequins in Various Positions. Fromoriginal drawings, in possession of Mr. Ellor. Harlequin to the Surrey Theatre. London,16 March 1824. Engraving. Courtesy of Theatre Museum, London. Victoria and AlbertImages/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

25 Walter Cohen (ed.), ‘The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice’, in Stephen Greenblatt(general ed.), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 2103 n.1,

Felicity Nussbaum28



Mungo’s refrain in The Padlock—‘Mungo here, Mungo there, Mungo ev’rywhere’—describes his intimidating ubiquity, resembling that of Roderigo although his statusas a maltreated overworked servant contrasts to the Shakespearean noble.

Figure 2.2. Alexandre Manceau, Harlequin or Arlecchino of 1671. Engraving. From MauriceSand,Masque et bouffons (comédie italienne): texte et dessins (Paris, 1860). Courtesy of Casa GoldoniMuseum, Venice. Photographed by Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

parses the line as ‘a vagrant and vagabond foreigner (perhaps suggesting a planet wandering off course)’.Thanks to Carla Freccero for mentioning this reference at the Huntington Library Long Eighteenth-Century Seminar, October 2014.




In The Padlock the university student Leander first appears as a lame buskerwho plays on his feigned disability to win Leonora’s affections. He affects to havebeen held a slave among the Barbary Moors, dissociating slavery from complex-ion and aligning Oriental exoticism and slavery with the Caribbean. LikeOthello, he weaves a spell with a tale, a song of captivity about a Turk’s lasciviouspursuit of a female Christian slave, Jezabel [sic]. Leander sings an air about awicked Turk’s intent to behead the captive who, like Leonora, is confined by atyrannical master. In the song the Turk is charmed into reform, just as Mungoand Leonora succumb to the spell of Leander’s song. Leander’s bribe of wine alsotempts Mungo to violate Don Diego’s firm directive but, unsuccessful in unlockingthe eponymous padlock on the house door, the minstrel Leander, seeming also topresent a menacing ubiquity, enters the house and accompanies Mungo as they singin wild confusion.When Don Diego returns unexpectedly to find the drunken Mungo along with

Leander pursuing Leonora, the rejected old man recognizes his folly in demandingthe young girl’s hand and agrees to the lovers’ marriage.26 The long-sufferingMungo, however, bears the blame and is punished with bastinadoes. Leander,having won Leonora, proves that he may be no more open-minded about marriagethan Don Diego when, citing Prior’s ‘English Padlock’, he sings, ‘Let all her waysbe unconfin’d / And clap your padlock on her mind’ (1.9). In short, for Dibdin thepadlock signifies at once Mungo’s continuing enslavement and Leonora’s ongoingconfinement, as well as her inability to escape potential subjection from eitherhusband-to-be. Women’s oppression in marriage parallels Oriental captivity andCaribbean slavery.Mungo’s performance in the opera buffa toggles uneasily between acceding to

society’s assumptions about black inferiority and honouring his essential humanity.Engravings of Dibdin’s Mungo show him blacked up, and his striped costumealludes to his Caribbean origins (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4).James Gillray’s caricatures and Agostino Brunias’s paintings of West Indian

scenes similarly represent African slaves and Creole women wearing colourfullystriped linen turbans, dresses, and trousers.27 While the history of striped clothingreveals a medieval association of stripes with the Devil, striped fabric later became asign of slavery or imprisonment. Around the time of the American Revolution,stripes began to take on rebellious connotations, and wearing stripes could indicatesympathy for the colonists’ cause.28 Thus, Mungo’s clothing may, like the comic

26 The lovers’ parts were sung by Joseph Vernon and Elizabeth Arne, who was replaced by EleanorRadley after her unexpected death on 1 May 1769. Charles Bannister played Don Diego.

27 On caricature and ‘black humour’, see K. Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and Refinement: Picturing theBritish West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 71–116.

28 Striped costuming, a visual geographic or racial marker, reinforces Mungo’s slave status andalignment with the Caribbean. Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and StripedFabric, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 110 n.51, posits thatAmerican revolutionaries chose ‘striped cloth, symbol of slavery (already in 1770, the prisoners inPennsylvania and Maryland penitentiaries wore striped clothes), to express the idea of the serf whobreaks his chains, and . . . to reverse the code of the stripe: stripes, a sign of the loss of freedom, become,with the American Revolution, a sign of freedom gained’.

Felicity Nussbaum30



opera and its epilogue, have visibly signified in the British context at once bothfreedom and resistance, slavery and emancipation, to reflect the many contradic-tions represented by his character.29A spoken epilogue to The Padlock appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine,

purportedly written nearer to 1768, but published only in October 1787,30to freight the comedy with abolitionist sentiments. Mungo contests the audience’slaughter by appealing to their compassion and calls ‘for stronger, deeper feelingshere’. He seriously demands his right to justice, to property, and to marry and havechildren, in a serious plea to Britons that he be accorded full humanity: ‘Comesfreedom then from colour? Blush with shame, / And let strong Nature’s crimsonmark your blame.’ That this epilogue appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a

Figure 2.3. Butler Clowes,Mr. Dibdin as the Character of Mungo, in the Celebrated Opera ofthe PADLOCK (1768). London, 1769. Mezzotint. Courtesy of the Harvard TheatreCollection.

29 In contrast, Prithi Kanakamedala in ‘Staging Atlantic Slavery’, in Swindells and Taylor,Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 673, argues that stripes erase Mungo’s ‘African origins’. Thatthey may signify a ‘handicap or liability’ seems more plausible.

30 ‘Epilogue to The Padlock’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 57, part 2 (October 1787): 913–14.




widely distributed periodical, suggests that The Padlock evolved in the nineteenyears following its first production to turn away from the satirical treatment of adrunken servant outsider towards a plea for slave freedom as the alien appeals for hisrights: ‘For though no Briton, Mungo is a man!’ (914).While Mungo’s blackface presence in The Padlock has been frequently discussed

in recent years, the music to the comic opera has received scant attention. The scoreis vital to the characterization of the painfully abject Mungo and adds to theaudience’s sympathetic response, but it also highlights the comic incongruity ofpairing West Indian dialect with traditional English and Italian tunes. Dibdin’sstrengths as a composer and librettist lay in creating memorable melodic and vocallines that parallel the play’s dramatic action and encourage expressive movementand gesture. The comic opera was especially notable for its use of ‘flusters andblusters’, and quick 6/8 time. Some listeners found the rapid repetition of the two-or four-bar phrases annoying but credited it with making the music easy to

Figure 2.4. Mr. Dibden in the Character of Mungo. Engraving. From Dramatic Characters,or Different Portraits of the English Stage (London, 1779).

Felicity Nussbaum32



memorize and imitate. Audiences apparently sang the songs in synchrony with theperformers as they had for John Gay’s popular Beggar’s Opera (1728), and theycarried the melodies into the street.31The Padlock is characterized by often nonsensical, yet appealing, sentimental

arias, and a choral finale provides thematic resolution. Don Diego’s bass pitter-patter, for example, makes him even more ridiculous in song than in speech.Following the opening overture with its allegro, andantino, and presto, he entersmusing, along with his elderly housekeeper Ursula. Here is the printed text:

. . .A cuckold, must that follow?Say what men will,Wedlock’s a pill,Bitter to swallow,And hard of digestion.But fear makes the danger seem double.Say, Hymen, what mischief can troubleMy peace, should I venture to try you?My doors shall be lock’d,My windows be block’d;No male in my house,Not so much as a mouse:Then, horns, horns, I defy you. (1.1)

Don Diego’s repetitions, sung Andante con motto, comically emphasize ‘cuckold’,‘Hymen’, ‘hard’, and his potential horns. Set to lively melodies that easily committhemselves to memory, the libretto switches to an allegro chant:

A Cuckold, a Cuckold, a Cuckold, a Cuckold, a Cuckold must that follow. Say whatMen will, Wedlock’s a Pill, bitter to swallow and hard hard of Digestion. Saywhat Men will, Wedlock’s a Pill, bitter to swallow and hard hard of digestion.32

The concluding presto section sung in a silly rhyming patter reveals Don Diego’sanxiety and pairs Hymen, the Greek god of marriage, with the horned sign ofcuckoldry (see Figure 2.5). The word ‘horn’ is punned with the sound of thecornets:

But Fear makes the danger seem double, But Fear makes the danger seem double, SayHymen what Mischief can trouble, say Hymen what Mischief can trouble, sayHymen, say Hymen what Mischief can trouble my Peace should I venture to tryyou, my Doors shall be lock’d, my Windows be block’d, my Doors shall be lock’d, myWindows be block’d, my Doors shall be lock’d, and myWindows be block’d, NoMalein my House not so much as a Mouse, my Doors shall be lock’d, and my Windows belock’d, no Male in my House not so much as a Mouse, then Horns Horns Horns! [asthe cornets twice repeat the notes] then Horns Horns Horns! The Horns Horns I defy you,my Doors shall be lock’d andmyWindows be block’d, then Horns Horns I defy you, no

31 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 348–53.32 The Padlock. A Comic Opera: As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane . . .The Music

by Mr Dibdin (London, n.d.), 6–7. Subsequent quotations are cited in the text by page number.




Figure2.5.

IsaacBickerstaffandCharlesDibdin,

‘Sun

gby

Mr.Bannister’,The

Padlock,ACom

icOpera:asitisP

erform

edat

theTheatre-

RoyalinDrury-Lane(London,

1768).



Male in my House not so much as a Mouse, then Horns Horns I defy you, then HornsHorns I defy you, then Horns Horns I defy you. (7–8)

Every repetition, then, allows Don Diego to engage in the ribald word play thatreinforces the theme of fearing an adulterous wife and makes the tyrant seem muchsillier than the words alone.Similar arguments about the way that the music reinforces meaning could be

made about every song in the comic opera. Leonora, for example, imitates birdsounds when she sings an aria to her pet robin accompanied by a piccolo. Enjoiningthe robin not to fly away, she trills over the word ‘happy’: ‘Were you wanton couldyou be half so happy as with me?’ (11). The lines in which Leonora compares herselfto a caged bird are repeatedly reiterated as she imagines flying (‘away I’d fly’, 15)over a sheep meadow singing an aria with runs above high C.The aged Diego, contesting his reputation as an impotent old man, ascends the

scale while singing ‘I feel my Blood mounting like Streams in a fountain.’He insistson his ‘Ability still’, but the high tenor Leander indicates his superior reach—andvirility—by hitting a high C. His virtuosity matches his beloved Leonora’s in theirmelodic duet that ends the scene.In contrast, baritone Mungo complains of his misery in the aria mentioned

earlier, ‘Dear Heart, Dear Heart, what a terrible Life am I led’. He repeatsemphatically the words ‘dog’ and ‘dead’, and he continues grumbling about thetedious hardships that define his life: ‘Night and Day ’tis the same, my Pain is theirgame’. Best known, of course, is ‘Mungo here, Mungo there, Mungo ev’rywhere’and the concluding lines, ‘I wish to my Heart I was dead! dead! dead! I wish to myHeart I was dead! dead! dead! I wish to my Heart I was dead’ (20). Further, whenLeander teaches Mungo to play the guitar, the score imitates the sounds of variousinstruments. Mungo and Ursula sing antiphonally rather than in unison like theyoung lovers, but all four join together for an ironic chorus about harmless pleasureas Leander scales Diego’s wall in spite of his ‘lame’ leg.The neighbouring convent’s bells signal that Leonora and Leander will live

harmoniously, as their sweet-sounding duet echoes the tolling. In contrast, DonDiego’s histrionic response upon returning to his violated domestic space is a fast-paced patter that simulates his heartbeat: ‘Thumping and jumping and jumpingand thumping and thumping and humping and humping and thumping andthumping and jumping and thumping, goes thumping & jumping and thumpinggoes thumping & jumping and thumping’ (32, 34). The phrase is, of course,printed only once in the play script, but in the musical rendering it is endlesslyrepeated. In the concluding ensemble, each character speaks about fetters, andeveryone, including Mungo, sings a refrain that reinforces the moral and appliesequally to disobedient wives and rebellious slaves: ‘Let all her ways be unconfin’d,and clap your padlock on her mind.’33 In short, the comic irony and musical fun

33 The Prior poem concludes, ‘Be to her Virtues very kind: / Be to her Faults a little blind: / Let allher Ways be unconfin’d: / And clap your Padlock—on her Mind.’




can only be fully appreciated when the script is interpreted in tandem with theaccompaniment.

DIBDIN ’S OTHER ENTERTAINMENTS ABOUTBLACKS AND SLAVERY

A much less successful comic entertainment than The Padlock, Henry Bate’s two-act opera buffa The Blackamoor Wash’d White (February 1776), also scored byDibdin, closed after four nights at Drury Lane, but the song lyrics were publishedseparately as Airs, Ballads, &c. in the Blackamoor Wash’d White (London, 1776).34In the unlikely plot Sir Oliver Oddfish, fretting that his wife and daughter willengage in affairs with his white servants, vows to hire only black servants, ‘aregiment of Blackamoor Devils’ (1.1). At the debut of the afterpiece the audienceresponded with ‘Much hissing and Crying out no more no more!’ Subsequentnights were equally rowdy as manager David Garrick unsuccessfully attempted toquiet the unruly spectators and eventually withdrew the play.35 The audience’sdiscontent may well have been sparked by the comic opera’s coarse language andracially charged material. The English and Italian melodies chafe against faux WestIndian dialect as they had in Mungo’s songs. The lyrics elide exotic difference as thealien intermingles with European tunes.In both The Padlock and The Blackamoor the blackface character presents a

splintered identity that reflects a dissonance between what is spoken or sung andthe body that intones it. Oddfish is the target of the opera’s joke because one of thenewly hired servants proves to be an English soldier Frederic, the suitor of Oddfish’sdaughter Julia. Disguised as Amoroso, Frederic’s West Indian dialect is pepperedwith the sexual double entendres typical of fabliaux. Oddfish’s nephew Grevilleencourages Frederic in his defiant scheme, likening blacking up to violating linguisticand social conventions, ‘nay their very principles’. The racial slurs and denigration ofblacks—‘blackey man’, ‘Neger’, ‘raven’, ‘magpye’, ‘ugly devil’, and ‘saucer eyes’—issue principally from the white valet Jerry whose position is most threatened.Just as Leander had done, Frederic extends the connections of slavery to an

Orientalized North Africa when he sings about an Egyptian who discovers that a‘young Teaf ’ (meaning ‘thief ’, 2.1) plucked the fruit of his precious cherry treewhile he was napping. The parallel to Oddfish’s bizarre attempt to guard hiswomen’s virtue is obvious. In the carnivalesque atmosphere of the comic opera,

34 H. Bate Dudley (Henry Bate), The Black-a-Moor Wash’d White: A Comic Opera (1776), LarpentMS 400, Huntington Library; subsequent references are to this unpaginated text; and The Overture &Favorite Songs in the Blackamoor: A New Comic Opera (London, n.d.) in St. Andrews UniversityLibrary. See Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in theLong Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 220–6.

35 George W. Stone Jr (ed.), The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 4, 1747–1776, (Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 1948–50. The Westminster Magazine review (February1776), 4: 82–3, finds the dialogue ‘not only barren of wit, but coarse to an extreme’. Calling ‘theMusic of several [songs] very pleasing’, the reviewer objects to the ridiculousness of the plot, thoughnot to Frederic’s blackface.

Felicity Nussbaum36



Jerry, referring to the glutting of the British labour market with the cheap labour offreed slaves, laments, ‘Why surely the times are turn’d topsey turvey, that whiteEnglishman [sic] should give place to foreign Blacks!’ Another favourite ballad wasone that Greville/Mr King sang about the moral certainty of British soldiers:‘Brittish [sic] boys will still be right / ’Till they prove that black is white!’ (1.1).East and West Indian, like the ancient Egyptian in The Padlock, are interchange-

able in their blackness:

M’hap the Nabob that brought the poor CreatureFrom Father, and Mother and allIs himself of a Blackamoor natureDark within as the tribe of Bengall. (1.1)

In other words, the white nabob who wrenched the black slave from his parents ishimself, ironically, a blackamoor at heart. Having recognized Frederic by hissinging voice, Julia embraces the lute-playing blackamoor, though of course heproves reassuringly to be white, thus averting an Othello-like tragedy. Perhaps thefact that Dibdin only composed the score but did not play the blackface role mayhave contributed to The Blackamoor’s failure.I have been focusing mainly on the Dibdin of the 1760s and 1770s, but in the

late 1780s and 1790s Dibdin made commercial use of his renown as a blackfacecharacter when he parlayed his talent for mimicking West Indian accents intostaged recitations and singing performances called ‘Readings and Music’ and‘Table Entertainments’. Dibdin accompanied himself on an inventive one-man-band piano-organ with an attached set of bells, a drum, tambourine, gong, guitar,and lute. Incorporating these into one instrument, Dibdin anticipates the bones,banjo, and tambourine that would later accompany minstrelsy.At this later point in his career, Dibdin attempted to present himself as respect-

able and patriotic, and just how his slave songs fitted into the growing sentiment forabolition can only be conjectured. Included in Dibdin’s evening’s entertainmentswere a number of ‘Negro Songs’ in dialect such as ‘Kickaraboo’ (‘kick the bucket’),in which a slave sings, dances, and plays a banjo to postpone death. The memorableopening couplet, variously rendered, predicts a paradisial future of seeming racialharmony: ‘Poor negro say one ting you no take offence / Black and white be onecolour a hundred year hence.’36 One early commentator, noting Dibdin’s specialskill in representing ‘negro characters’, provides a telling transcription of hisanecdote, ‘A Sketch of Crude Vice and Virtue’, about a trickster slave Cudjo andhis mulatto friend Quaco. The two drink the rum they are supposed to carry toCudjo’s master and substitute river water: ‘Come to the ribber, put lilly wee dropwater.’37 The letter Cudjo is charged to deliver metamorphoses into a talkingtattletale that exposes their ruse, even though they hide the note under a stone.38

36 Cruikshank, Universal Songster, 1:29.37 Leman Rede, The Road to the Stage, xix.38 Musical Tour, 358–60. In another version Cudjo further mocks the mulatto (‘dam yellow copper

kin—you no nation—you a mule’) for not knowing his father’s identity and lampoons his sister.




Dibdin treats the gullible black men as ignorant, but he justifies telling the storybecause it allegedly offers a fable-like moral that reveals the consequences of envy:‘Had Juvenal been a Negro he would have written in the language of Cudgo [sic].’39Dibdin incorporated other uncouth ‘Negro songs’ in dialect into his solo

entertainments including ‘One Negro come from Jenny Land’, ‘One MountainNeger he no find’, and ‘The Sun Go Down, the World Take a Breath’. These songsexpress sympathy for the relentless labour and cruel beatings slaves endured, butthey also gloss over the ‘massa’s’ injustice and thus seem more ameliorist than anti-slavery. For example, in the ‘Negro duet’ of ‘The Sun Go Down’, the exhausted,sun-blistered workers dance, sing, and play the banjo to ‘drive away to-morrow’.Sounding the ching ring or tambourine, they dream of escaping the overseer’s whipin the afterlife:

Chingering! Chingering! Next world come,Overseer no jerk ye;Meet tipsy quashy uncle Tom,No more to workee workee.40

In ‘One Mountain Neger’ when the grateful slave finds a kind master, he swears toserve until death;41 again in ‘One Negro come from Jenny Land’, Cudgo, unable tofind peace in this world, is made a cuckold when his master impregnates his wifeQuashy, producing a ‘squalling pick-a-ninny’. The song counsels acquiescencewhen confronted with unconscionable actions and postpones hope until theafterlife: ‘Wear horns and be contented’. Dibdin’s striking and shaking the tam-bourine in accompaniment mimics the percussive cracking of the whip in therefrain: ‘Ching, Ching’ring, ching; Ching, Ching’ring, ching so hard / PoorNegro worky, worky.’42 Published in America as well as England, these songscondemn the brutality of slavery, but they cannot be construed as songs promotingabolition.

DIBDIN ’S ORIENTAL ENTERTAINMENTS

Dibdin blends slavery’s miseries with Eastern captivity and exoticism in a numberof his other musical entertainments, probably having been influenced by thepopularity of The Arabian Nights (1707–17).43 His Magic of Orosmanes; Or,Harlequin Slave and Sultan: A Pantomime, Drawn from the Arabian Legends(1785), smooths over the differences among captives of all kinds in variousgeographical locations. It follows the pattern of harlequinades in which a black

39 Cited in Hans Nathan, ‘Negro Impersonation in Eighteenth Century England’, Notes, 2ndseries, 2/4 (1945): 245–54, 251, from Musical Tour.

40 ‘The Sun Go Down, the World Take a Breath’ in Hogarth, 1:81–2.41 Hogarth, 1:81–2.42 Cruikshank, The Universal Songster, 1:403. ‘Jenny’ is a town on the northern coast of Suriname.43 By 1800 eighty English editions of Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits, popularly known as

The Arabian Nights, had been published.

Felicity Nussbaum38



slave turns into a harlequin who is ultimately given his liberty. The Magic ofOrosmanes, opening with an active slave market, introduces enchained men andwomen who sing of their longing to be free:

Tho’ in indignant chains confin’d,And lost to liberty,Yet, spite of these, the noble mindIn slavery dares be free. (1.1)

The chief eunuch singles out the Harlequin and the Clown as mutes to purchase forthe seraglio, the Eastern equivalent to chattel slavery. Enlisted as slaves, they areunable to speak their resistance. Harlequin, sounding the theme of a dance ofdeath, comically contemplates various methods of suicide as preferable to slavery—poison, a pistol, or a noose.Dibdin’s spectacular entertainment, accompanied by foot-tapping tunes that

deflect the horrors of captivity, lightens the burden of enslavement and transformsit into an effect of enchantment. Phillip James de Loutherbourg’s magnificentscenery created in seriatim the illusion of a seraglio, the seacoast, a rural grove, adesert, a palace, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. Orosmanes reveals that theSultan Osmyn magically ‘shrunk’ Harlequin into an ape to prevent his marriage tothe Sultan’s daughter, Zulma (1.2). The roving party meets up with a motley groupat an inn, including two Janissaries, who, in an echo of Dibdin’s racist anecdote, areduped into believing that the water they are drinking is wine.Though the comic operas are darker than the harlequinade, both genres raise

historically contingent issues around slavery, captivity, and the rights of women.Dibdin’s music for the pantomime has not been found, but The Magic of Orosmanesinterestingly resembles The Padlock in its double response to slavery as comic,yet allowing for defiance. After a series of misadventures, Harlequin subdues hisenemies and is happily released into his natural form. Slavery, then, is reduced to amagically induced, transformable state rather than a deliberate, irrevocable, com-mercial transaction.Enslavement in its various manifestations, then, connects Dibdin’s dramatic

entertainments, whether the captive is West Indian, African, Moor, or Turk,male or female. Letters in The Musical Tour of Mr Dibdin (1788) reflect thecomposer’s conflicted attitude towards slavery as a staged epistolary debate betweenadvocates from Manchester (pro-abolition) and Liverpool (pro-slavery). Dibdin’sabolitionist letter accuses his countrymen of inciting ‘the natives to commit partialdepredations on each other’ and urges merchants to give up the trade, ‘a disgrace tohumanity’.44 The Liverpudlians, on the contrary, claim that slavery is a blessingthat the Africans prefer to being sacrificed, eaten, or sold in their native lands. Thehappy slaves are treated with ‘mildness and lenity’ in the Middle Passage;45 they aremercifully subject to no more than thirty-nine lashes, and are granted a bit ofground to work. Dibdin’s final ameliorizing sentiment is probably most reflective ofhis views: simply correcting slavery’s abuses rather than abolishing the trade would

44 Musical Tour, 221. 45 Ibid., 227.




have made the reasonableness of this position self-evident because, he contendsimprobably, at least one slave ship offered the slaves more ‘comfort and conveni-ence’ than the crewmen. In the end Dibdin equivocates, thus reflecting the tensionsapparent in his entertainments: ‘It would have exceeded my duty to say whosearguments are the most worthy [of] attention.’46The site of slavery’s amusing miseries moves to the seraglio in two of Bickerstaff ’s

other short pieces that were accompanied by Dibdin’s music, The Captive (1769) andThe Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio (1775), along with Dibdin’s two-act Seraglio(1776). In the singing farce The Captive, Dibdin is responsible for six musicalnumbers (1, 4, 6, 10–12), five of which were drawn from Italian operas.47 Maleand female slaves, some described as black, sing about their pleasure in workingthe gardens:

Ah, how sweet the rural scene!Circled by those charming groves,Slavery its labour loves,And the captive hugs his chain. (1.1)

The play echoes the frame tale of The Arabian Nights, as well as other harlequinadesand comic operas in which a sultan suspects his wife of adultery. Posing as a slavereduces captivity to a mere performance as the Cadi sings of his vigilant attentive-ness to her actions:

In emblem I am like a catThat’s watching for a mouse . . .Just so will I watch her,And so if I catch her,I’ll worry her out of her life. (2.2)

Eastern women are the agents of Christianity, patriotism, and liberty in manyeighteenth-century plays, for the love of a good Christian woman frequentlyreforms an Eastern despot. In Dibdin’s two-act Seraglio, the harem and its slavesare set in the context of ship and seashore.48 The Turkish bashaw (curiously playedby a cross-dressed actress) is a slave to Abdallah, who rules a seraglio but transformsfrom despotic stereotype to an enlightened ruler who belatedly fulfils his promise toallow Elmira, ‘a slave among strangers’, to become empress. Finally she convinceshim to free the English captives: ‘Load these Christians with Riches, and give themsafe and honourable Conduct to their own Country’ (2.2).Bickerstaff ’s The Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio (1775), including two songs

by Dibdin, again features a captive woman’s persuasion of a Turkish sultan to

46 Ibid., 232.47 The score to The Songs in the Comic Opera of the Captive (London, 1769) is held in the British

Library collection.48 Charles Dibdin, The Seraglio; A Comic Opera, in Two Acts (London, 1776). The lyrics to Dibdin’s

popular sea song, the rondeau ‘Blow high, blow low’ appear in Airs, chorusses, &c. in the New MusicalEntertainment of The Seraglio; as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden (London, 1776), aswell as The Overture, Songs, &c., in ‘The Seraglio’ (London, 1776).

Felicity Nussbaum40



disband his harem and emulate ‘civilized’ Christian culture. The Sultan favours thespirited English slave Roxalana (famously played by Frances Abington), but theeunuch Osmyn finds Elmira, a Georgian slave, and Ismena, a Persian captive, moreamenable: ‘Court the charms of the fair, of the black, of the brown. / They’reflowers that embellish the garden of love.’49 Just as Mungo protested against hisconfinement in The Padlock, the insolent Roxalana vehemently objects to hercaptivity, and she proves triumphant in instituting change. In the unlikely originalending, Roxalana becomes the Sultana but willingly gives up her power because theSultan promises to treat her as an equal.Most relevantly to our discussion of Dibdin’s views on slavery, the eunuch

Osmyn was originally intended to be a blackface role, perhaps as a means tobuild on the popularity of Mungo. The Larpent manuscript (though not theprinted version) lists him as ‘Osmyn Kislar-aga, Or Chief of the Black Eunuchs’,and the black mute eunuchs enact stage business.50 Roxalana calls Osmyn a‘blackamoor’ in the manuscript version of his soliloquy, but the epithet was omittedin performance, perhaps because Dibdin, no longer associated with Drury Lane,would not have been available to play the blackface role. After the first night, eroticallusions to the sexual services required of the seraglio slaves were also struck out.According to The London Stage, the five songs were reduced to two—one byIsmena, the other by Osmyn—in subsequent productions.51Eighteenth-century entertainments, according to music historian Berta Joncus,

‘purged the Orient of otherness’ merely to gesture towards an ‘exotic patina’ of theEast that was ‘reduced to an ornament, designed to enhance its wearer’.52 Certainlythis is true of the music, for neither libretto nor musical score imitates Easternsounds (although Janissary musicians with drums, bells, and cymbals occasionallyappeared in other productions); they rely instead on English and Italian melodiesand instruments. For Dibdin it was easier to incorporate linguistic, musical, andcorporeal differences from the West Indies than from the East. Yet whether viewedfrom the East or West, being enslaved or held captive lent itself musically, at least,to comedy, unlike the tragic African counterparts of Othello or Oroonoko, or thetragic Eastern heroines such as Cleopatra, Zara, Zobeide, or Semiramis.In short, Dibdin’s compositions, moving nonchalantly from songs about African

slaves to Eastern captives and seraglios, reveal the contradictions of racial thinkingand emancipatory discourse in the early days when abolitionist and pro-slaveryviews sometimes shared common elements. Riddled with contradictions, earlyarticulations of racial thinking do not fit easily into the patterns they would assume

49 The Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio; A Farce in Two Acts (London, 1781), 1.1.50 Larpent MS 397, Huntington Library, unpaginated.51 Stone, The London Stage, Part 4, vol. 3; Peter A. Tasch, ‘Garrick’s Revisions to Bickerstaff ’s The

Sultan’, Philological Quarterly 50/1 (1971): 141–9, 145 n.9; and Larpent MS 397, HuntingtonLibrary.

52 Berta Joncus, ‘ “Nectar if you taste and go, Poison if you stay”: Struggling with the Orient inEighteenth-Century British Musical Theatre’, in Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner (eds),Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2013), 283, 309.




after 1833. Because Mungo challenged his ill treatment, we might assume thatDibdin, having popularized comic blackface, was prescient in voicing abolitionistsentiments. While it is true that the trickster Mungo, like other slave characters,‘engaged in a power struggle with his master, a reminder to audiences that slaveowners did not really know their slaves’,53 the black servant was mocked for hisdrunkenness and obsequiousness as much as he was pitied because of Diego’sabuse. As we have seen, later in the century Dibdin continued to promote himselffor commercial gain as an entertainer exploiting racialist anecdotes and coarsesentiments. Dibdin caricatured African slaves, Eastern monarchs, eunuchs, andupstart women to further his career rather than to forward human rights. Dibdin’slight-hearted music stirred sentimental feelings for overworked and mistreatedslaves, but its comedy reassured a nation intrigued by alien peoples and practicesthat English boys would still prove white; that feisty Englishwomen would convertsultans and help free Europeans held captive in foreign lands; and that gratefulblack slaves, rather than rebelling against injustice, should content themselves withhopes of an afterlife. The comic opera of the mid- and late eighteenth centurybecomes a catalyst for racially inflected farcical dialogues, nonsense songs, catchyrefrains, mock dialect, pitter-patter, and musical repetition. Dibdin’s happy enter-tainments, then, played a critical role in intimating that the threat of slave rebellioncould be kept at bay, that tyrannical sultans might be tamed, and that a simulatedencounter with the exotic would ensure the preservation of British virtue andvalues. At the same time, however, they also recognized at some level that enter-tainments like these allowed them to deflect the serious issues of the day by singingmerrily and laughing heartily about captivity and slavery.

53 Melinda Lawson, ‘Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the NorthernStage, 1776–1860’, Journal of the Civil War Era 1/1 (2011): 25–55, 31, 47.

Felicity Nussbaum42


Comp. by: Jaganathan Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 0003304479 Date:16/10/17Time:12:30:51 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003304479.3DDictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 43

3Dibdin at the Royal Circus

Michael Burden

Dibdin—inspired, mercurial, and financially slapdash—was perhaps not the bestperson to be involved with the intricacies of running a theatre, let alone one inwhich he would be one of a triumvirate. But in 1782, that is just what he did whenhe began his association with what would become the Royal Circus Equestrian andPhilharmonic Academy.1 This venture presented a range of miscellaneous enter-tainments, including feats of horsemanship, allegorical scenes, music, and songs,much of it in performances by children being trained for the stage. The enterprisehad its origins in the activities of Charles Hughes (1746/7–97), a ‘strong man’ andformer employee of the pioneer equestrian showman, Philip Astley (1742–1814),who had opened his ring in what is now the Waterloo area of London in 1770.Hughes left Astley’s employ and opened his own exhibition and riding school ringin opposition in 1771; it was closed by the magistrates in 1773, and Hughes thenembarked on an eight-year tour of Europe and Russia. When he returned toLondon, Hughes teamed up with Dibdin, who was feeling hounded out of thedifferent London theatres, and they began this new project—the Royal Circus—that involved the staging of mixed entertainments.Both Hughes and Dibdin brought to the new venture substantial experience of

competing in the London theatricalmarketplace. This chapter explores how they usedthese experiences to develop an innovative form of public entertainment that wouldbe able to compete in the burgeoning and cutthroat world of the London minortheatres. Through a combination of architecture, spectacle, music, and novelty, theysought to outdo their rivals and achieve commercial success. Their case offers aninsight into the increasingly fierce competition that lay behind the striking innov-ations of the minor theatres in this formative period of their development.2

LOCATION AND ARCHITECTURE

Crucial to the success of any new theatre in late-eighteenth-century London wasthe need to acquire an advantageous site and a suitably impressive building.

1 This title appeared in some of the early advertisements: Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser(28 October 1782).

2 See Moody, Illegitimate Theatre.



The building constructed for the Royal Circus was built south of the river, to theSurrey side of the new Blackfriars Bridge. The bridge’s construction, completed in1769 and promoted by the City of London Corporation, was part of improvementson both sides of the river, and its access road created a junction with the Borough,Blackfriars, and Westminster Bridge roads called St George’s Circus:

The approach to the Obelisk, where the roads from the three Bridges of Londonconcentrate, is not without its picturesque beauty; . . . the spacious road which leads toBlackfriars Bridge is most worthy of attention. The houses on each side are superior inmagnitude to the generality of structures in this quarter, and the equestrian theatre,called the Royal Circus, which rises in the fore-ground, by its variety of outline relievesthe tame insipidity of the modern brick buildings, though it cannot be praised for thechastity of its architecture.3

The fact that it was accessible from all the bridges clearly made the site anadvantageous one. It was not always safe; the area beyond the buildings consistedof much open ground, and there was potential for footpads and other dangers,which the theatre tried to ameliorate: ‘In addition to the present Watch, a HorsePatrole [sic] is provided from the Academy door to all the bridges.’4 Apart from itsease of access, another advantage was that the rule of the Lord Chamberlain did notextend to the Surrey side of the river, removing the need for licensing of both thepremises and the works, although, as we shall see, the Royal Circus did not escaperegulatory problems.The site of the theatre was controlled by Colonel West, and with his funds and

those of other supporters, a building was erected—supposedly at a cost of £15,000—with those funders becoming proprietors; according to George Hogarth, Dibdin wasappointed sole manager for life, and was to receive a quarter of the profits.5 Noarchitect can be identified for the Circus, seen in Figure 3.1, but the evidence suggestsan attempt to project an air of classical grandeur. It was claimed that it resembled ‘thecircuses of antiquity’, in particular the Circus Maximus in Rome, whose entertain-ments had included ‘horse-coursing’. Such puffery was to be expected, but we dolearn that ‘at the top of Hughes’s Circus is a figure of Pegasus, as applicable to a partof the amusements of the place’.6 And sure enough, the 1795 painting includes thePegasus on a plinth at the apex of the gable on the main facade. This was a gesturedesigned to reinforce the classical aspirations of the architecture while simult-aneously drawing attention to the equestrian nature of the entertainments. Providingfor the comfort and refreshment of the clientele was another vital feature of asuccessful theatrical building: ‘We hear an elegant coffee room is fitting up at theRoyal Circus, which has a communication with the box lobby, for the purpose ofserving the company with Ices, Orgeat, Lemonade, and other refreshments.’7Whether the building was entirely completed when it opened is not clear,

3 Thomas Malton, A Picturesque Tour through the Cities of London and Westminster, Illustrated withthe Most Interesting Views, Accurately Delineated and Executed, 2 vols (London, 1792), 1:2.

4 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (23 December 1782).5 Hogarth, 1:xvii. 6 Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (2 November 1782).7 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (9 November 1782).

Michael Burden44



but a subsequent announcement suggests an unfinished (or just finished) building,a circumstance that may account for the curious fact that members of the publicwere not allowed in to see it before the opening night—it would have been goodadvance publicity to have allowed potential ticket holders to see a new theatrespace.8 It was left to the London Chronicle to assist the circulation of rumours of theglories to be found therein: ‘The stile in which it is arranged, with the light mannerof its decoration (the colours being principally a straw-coloured ground with silverballustrades [sic] and silver ornaments) gives the whole an air of simple grandeur,and forms a very striking and pleasant coup d’oeil.’9This new venture was unlikely to have been met with delight by actual or

potential competitors, most especially those at Astley’s Amphitheatre just a shortdistance away. And it was this competition that gave rise to a report that Hughes’shorses were poisoned—three of them died—which contemporary newspapersbelieved not to have been a random attack, but aimed against the equestrian.10 Sonear to the action was he that Astley later felt constrained by rumour to denyhaving done it,11 for there was no doubt that Dibdin’s venture was a serious

Figure 3.1. Anonymous, A view of the Royal Circus in St George’s Fields. Oil on canvas, c.1795.© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

8 Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (28 October 1782). 9 Quoted in Fahrner, 98.10 Public Advertiser (30 September 1782).11 Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (14 November 1782).




threat: ‘Astley, with more understanding than the world gives him credit for, haswisely shut up his own theatre during the commencement of the more nouvelleand engaging exhibitions at the Royal Circus, thereby leaving his competitors toreap their well-earned harvest of public favour and applause.’12 This may havebeen a prudent move on Astley’s part: by allowing the public to concentrate onthe new enterprise, he avoided losing money on what would have been a splitaudience, and was able to re-open—as he did—once the novelty had worn off.Astley did not, however, have things all his own way; a circus puff suggested that,in response to the new enterprise, he had to lift his game: ‘Upon the whole, wemust declare, that it will be necessary for Mr. Astley to make some . . . improve-ments in his exhibition, unless he will allow his Amphitheatre to be totallyeclipsed by the Royal Circus.’13 The shows at the Royal Circus clearly had enoughgoing for them to be seen as a credible threat to others in the business.

RING, STAGE, AND SPECTACLE

Fundamental to the competitiveness of the new building was Dibdin’s innovativeconception of a combination of a stage and an equestrian ring. In fact, the origin ofthe ‘ring’ for equestrian shows lay with Astley and developed out of his performancetrademark of riding in a circle (as opposed to the straight line of his rivals), a formatthat allowed, on the one hand, the audience to see the riders throughout theperformance, and on the other, the riders to generate a centrifugal force whichassisted them in their horseback gymnastics. Astley developed his arena into‘Astley’s Amphitheatre of Equestrian Arts’, which opened in 1773. Astley, though,never called his institution a circus, leaving Dibdin to coin that usage. However,when Dibdin and Hughes joined forces, the latter’s period in Astley’s ring gave theRoyal Circus the benefit of that experience.In order to surpass the Amphitheatre and seize the competitive advantage for the

Royal Circus, Dibdin decided that the stage should take a more prominent part inthe performances. He claimed that his auditorium would allow for shows of sceneson the stage, accompanied by simultaneous equestrian events in the ring. His aimwas ‘to have a stage on which might be represented spectacles, each to terminatewith a just [sic] or tilting-match, or some other grand object, so managed to form anovel, and striking coup-de-theatre . . . [in a way] that the business of the stage andring might be united’.14 Dibdin clearly hoped that the two theatrical spaces wouldspeak to and complement each other. In realization, one commentator remarkedthat the auditorium was ‘disposed in an oval form, at one end of which stands thestage, and round the other end are thrown the pit, boxes and gallery, the centreforming a kind of pit for equestrian performances’.15 Figure 3.2, originally

12 London Evening Post (9–12 November 1782).13 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (22 April 1784).14 Life, 1:105. 15 Quoted in Fahrner, 98.

Michael Burden46



published in the Lady’s Magazine, shows what appears to be a children’s pony racein progress, with a miniature grandstand complete with pennant centre stage.It also suggests that there was a fairly large proscenium area containing what maybe two stage doors with apertures above, and two large curtained stage boxes. Alsopictured are two tiers of boxes, a gallery with ‘pigeon holes’, a pit, a large two-tieredcandle chandelier, and (a decoration indispensable to any theatrical venue) a trophyover the centre of the proscenium arch; the stage itself had two slanted points ofaccess to the arena.

THE CIRCUS AS AN ACTORS ’ NURSERY

In showing children’s pony races, Figure 3.2 points to one of the most interestingnovelties the Royal Circus had to offer the London theatre public: performances bycasts consisting entirely of children. These derived from the Circus’s advertisedfunction as an ‘Academy’ or actors’ training school. London had previously hadactors’ nurseries; in 1663, the two patentees Thomas Killigrew and WilliamDavenant petitioned the Attorney General for a grant to allow them to set up a

Figure 3.2. Thomas Rothwell, ‘The interior of the Royal Circus’. London, 1795. FromLady’s Pocket Magazine (London, 1795). Engraving. © Enthoven Collection, Victoria andAlbert Museum, London.




third theatre ‘for ye instructing of Boyes & Girles in ye Art of Acting’.16 A largelyunsuccessful venture, it did, after a number of transformations, end up at theBarbican in 1671, and subsequently closed. More recently, in 1756, TheophilusCibber had opened a ‘histrionic academy for the instruction of young persons ofgenius’ claiming that he wanted to teach them ‘the Arts of Action and Elocution,&c . . . . Thus this Academy may become a Nursery of Actors and Actresses’.17Cibber opened it in a theatre at Richmond, Surrey, where it was advertised as a‘cephalic snuff warehouse’ to avoid ‘the penalties of the act of parliament againstunlicensed comedians’.18 By the following season, Cibber’s ‘histrionic academy’was performing ‘with great regularity and decorum’ at Buckingham House inSouthwark (also out of reach of the licenser) ‘to a crowded and genteel audience’,19but it seems to have been a short-lived enterprise.There were therefore important precedents for nurseries, but these were, by the

1780s, defunct. Dibdin’s announcement that the Royal Circus would offer suchperformances could thus be presented as an attractive novelty. Puffs in theLondon press announced that the performances would involve fifty children ‘ofboth sexes, from six years old to fourteen’,20 while Dibdin himself claimed tohave engaged some sixty children to act as dancers and singers for his variousproductions at the Circus between 1782 and 1783. Nevertheless, other voices inthe press, wise to the promotional tricks of theatre-managers, sounded a note ofscepticism. The St. James’s Chronicle remarked that ‘this Place of Entertainmentwas opened under the Title of an Academy, but on what Pretense, we are yet tolearn, as the Performances were mere Exhibitions, and not Schools for futurePurposes’.21 Others interpreted it as a theatrical gimmick worthy only of theminor theatres: because the Royal Circus lay outside the jurisdiction of the LordChamberlain (unlike the patent theatres royal in London itself), the house wasaccused of leaping ‘the low barriers of the Surrey Sessions’ in using children toreplace Astley’s ‘puppet shows’.22 Clearly, the demand for novelty that charac-terized the minor theatres was met with snooty disdain by certain sections ofLondon society, but in the opinion of the Royal Circus management, the com-mercial imperatives driving such innovation evidently outweighed any potentialloss of audience. And there was the law of unintended consequences; the scale of thepersonnel was such that it drew the critics’ attention:

16 State Papers (Domestic) 44/15, 117–19, cited in Robert D. Freeburn, ‘Charles II, the TheatrePatentees, and the Actor’s Nursery’, Theatre Notebook 48/3 (1994): 148–56, 150.

17 General Advertiser (8 July 1756), quoted in Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London: Being anHistorical Account of the Towns, Villages, and Hamlets, within Twelve Miles of that Capital, 4 vols(London, 1795–6), 1:469.

18 Lysons, Environs of London, 1:469.19 Public Advertiser (30 November 1757).20 Quoted in Andrew McConnell Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Edinburgh:

Canongate Books, 2010), 15.21 St. James’ Chronicle; or the British Evening Post (2–5 November 1782).22 Ibid.

Michael Burden48



Persons, Voices, Action, &c. are in such astonishing Disproportion to the wholeCircus, over which the Spectators view them, and even to the Stage on which theyperform, that it impresses the Mind with Sentiments of Ridicule or Compassion. TheViolence they offer to their little Organs of Speech, and the expanded and flying Modeof their Action, are the necessary Consequences of this radical Mistake. The Performersshould be Giants, and not Pigmies.23

Not only were they too small in the context of the stage and proscenium, but thetoo-large space apparently did not accommodate the juveniles’ immature voices andperforming style. As always, the motives for such criticism are unclear, but thewriter appears to have had a point.The description of The Fairy World, a piece for which no libretto survives,

suggests how some of the works thus ‘staged’ went. A show of horsemanship ‘willbe occasionally relieved by the Efforts of a Number of CHILDREN educated onthe Academy, who will perform their Exercises in Music, Dancing, and Oratory,comprehending a Series of Whimsical, Temporary, Ad Libitum, Preludes, Inter-mezzos, Ballets, and Farragos, Grotesque and Demi-Character’.24 This miscellan-eous collection of performances was designed to appeal to a broad clientele, butpresumably also served a pragmatic function, with the children simply performingunder the title of The Fairy World whatever items were ready from their lessons.The children clearly studied three things: speech, music (presumably singing), anddancing, which took up the lion’s share of the performances, and which included amedley of grotesque and demi-character (a term suggesting ‘telling a story through adance’) pieces. In the dramatis personae of a work such as the serenata The Cestus, wefind that the majority of the successful children were offspring of other Londonperformers. The Cestus is a masque-like piece, with a cast consisting of gods andgoddesses: Jupiter was sung by Andrew Sestini; Mars by Rosine Simonet; Venus byRosemond Wilkinson; Iris by Leonora Simonet; and Juno by Maria Romanzini.25Andrew Sestini was probably the son of Giovanna and Vincenzio Sestini, bothsingers at the King’s Theatre; Vincenzio was also the King’s Theatre’s tailor andcostume designer. The Simonet sisters, Rosine and Leonora, were the daughters ofthe King’s Theatre dancers, Louis and Adelaide Simonet. Rosemond Wilkinson—later Mrs John Mountain—was the daughter of a Mr Wilkinson, a slack-wire andtightrope performer, and his wife, a dresser and actress. Her siblings were theperformers Caroline, Frederick, and George Wilkinson, and she may have been theniece of the rope dancer, Isabella Wilkinson.26 And the last figure, Maria Romanzini,who had various romantic stories attached to her antecedents, was born in Caen,the daughter of Alexander Tersi, a strolling musician from Rome, and CatherineZeli, from Florence. She was brought to London, and made her English debut at

23 Ibid. 24 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (31 October 1782).25 Listed as ‘Miss Romanzini’ in the libretto; Maria Theresa Catherine, Mrs George Bland, née

Tersi, but also known as ‘Romani’: Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans,A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel inLondon, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), 2:162–9(1973).

26 Ibid., 10 (1984):346.




four years old. If the best ‘graduates’ were offspring of performers, then the questionmight be asked whether such indenture was necessary, given that they could havelearnt the trade regardless, but it does nevertheless point to three things. Firstly, itsuggests that these performers had confidence in the Royal Circus and in Dibdinto educate their children. Secondly, it demonstrates yet again the importance ofthe networks represented by the generations of theatrical and musical families,networks which secured jobs and roles, and which ensured some continuation oftheatrical authority. Thirdly, not only were such performances by entire casts ofchildren a novelty (almost) exclusive to the Royal Circus, but there is no doubt thatthey were an additional selling point for at least a certain section of the audiencewho could then witness performances by the children of their favourite stars of thelegitimate theatre.

PROGRAMMES, WORKS, GENRES

The Royal Circus was a fundamentally collaborative venture and responsibility forthe bills was split between the three departments: Dibdin had control of theburlettas; Hughes, a ‘strong man’ as well as an equestrian performer, dealt withthe horses and equestrian acts; and Giuseppe Grimaldi (c.1713–88) (brought inlater by Dibdin) trained the children and looked after the dances.27 We know littleof how these activities were coordinated on a day-to-day basis, and not much moreabout the organization of the performances, although the following announcementgives some impression of the nature of the equestrian events:

This and every Evening, the Royal Circus and Equestrian Academy will open with aregular and compleat [sic] Series of Equestrian Exercizes; containing a well-digestedand perfect System of all the necessary Rules for managing and rendering tractable thatnoble Animal the Horse, from placing the Foot in the Stirrup, to performing the mostdifficult and astonishing Equilibriums . . .To separate the different Species of Riding,and to recruit the Strength of the Performers, in order to render their Exertions moreworthy publick Notice, the Horsemanship will be interspersed with picturesque andallegorical Exhibitions.28

Dibdin’s efforts were clearly concentrated in the ‘picturesque and allegoricalExhibitions’, which consisted of a variety of works and genres. These were centralto Dibdin’s uniting the business of the ring and the stage. Some of these scenescontained some action, others none at all. Their themes were often notions ofnational identity; they included, for instance, a set of monuments of deceasedheroes, and the cavern of Merlin, the latter a topos that dated back to the

27 Grimaldi appears to have been a bully and sadist who locked the children ‘into a specially builtcage that was pulled forty feet into the fly-tower and left to dangle for hours above the stage’. He alsochoreographed a libellous and potentially obscene ballet called The Quakers, which was stopped with acourt injunction, and there were parental complaints, which ended in the local magistrates ordering ‘acomplete investigation into the morals of the place’. McConnell Stott, Joseph Grimaldi, 16.

28 Daily Advertiser, (20 December 1782).

Michael Burden50



1730s.29 There is no contemporary visual record of these shows, but an illustrationof the ‘grand Tournament’ scene fromTheMagic Flute, or, Harlequin Champion fora Royal Circus show in 1800 (Figure 3.3) conveys an idea of the type of staging thatmight have been found. The performers are all in character, that is, dressed (in thiscase) as members of Emperor Charlemagne’s retinue; the stage, which has a box setwith balconies, is draped with banners, shields, and other emblems of state; andthere is onstage music consisting of a bassoon, a trumpet, and a military drum.There is a fourth instrument, which appears to be an ‘antique’ wind instrument,possibly a shawm, giving a vague feeling of historicity to the scene. Given this is theRoyal Circus, it may be assumed that the horses are real.Such displays were obviously spectacular; here, the scene is about to erupt into

a joust between the two knights, one on a white horse, the other on a black one.But like all spectaculars, they had the capacity to go awry in performance.A humorous account of one disaster gives some insight into what might be expected

Figure 3.3. Charles Tomkins, Grand Tournament, in the presence of the Emperor Charlemagnein his chariot of chivalry. London, 30 September 1800. Engraving. © Trustees of the BritishMuseum.

29 Michael Burden, ‘Purcell’s King Arthur in the 1730s’, Restoration: Studies in English LiteraryCulture, 1660–1700 34/1–2 (2010–11): 117–38.




from one of the numerous allegorical scenes mentioned as having been included inthe evening’s bills:

A Circumstance occurred on Monday Evening at the Royal Circus, which it is to behoped may not prove prophetic. Among other Questions to be resolved by allegoricaland other Transparencies, the supposed Inhabitant of the new planet called theGeorgium Sydus, demanded of the Genius of the Enchanted Bower ‘When theHonour of England would decay?’ Upon this, the Word NEVER became conspicuouslyilluminated: The Painting, however, was hardly in View, when, from some Accident inthe Machinery, it fell on one Side; but it was presently replaced.—Let us hope that theHonour of Old England is not fallen irrevocably, but, notwithstanding it must beallowed there has been a Disarrangement in the Œconomy of the State Machinery,that those who are now to conduct the Business behind the political Curtain, will havethe Address to repair all past Defects, and to restore Old England to that State ofMagnificence and Splendour which once excited the Admiration and Envy of thewhole World.30

The ‘Disarrangement in the Œconomy of the State Machinery’ referred to wasthe severe undermining of the government’s majority in parliament following thenegative public reaction to the generous terms offered by Prime Minister LordShelburne in the ‘Provisional Agreement’, part of the preliminary negotiationsfor peace between Britain and the American colonies, which had been signed on29 November 1782. After this date, it was clear to the British public that thegovernment had ceded independence to the American colonies and granted themhuge tracts of land. Despite some small consolatory victories at sea, Britishimperial pride was severely dented.31 Such circumstances reveal the ways inwhich, even if not entirely successful in their execution, the Royal Circusspectaculars were designed to capitalize commercially on moments of heightenedpublic political excitement.These scenes and the equestrian shows appear to have been accompanied by

music, and the indications are that there was more music involved than even theprogrammes that appeared in the newspapers suggest. However, the nature of bothtypes of show—ad-libbed, relying on variable theatrical timings, and probablyadjusted to take into account audience reactions on any particular night—impliesthat apart from set pieces, such as songs, which do survive, Dibdin’s music,otherwise lost, was generic and flexible, enabling him (and the orchestra) to respondto the actual performance.Of the pantomimes, much might be gleaned from the full printed description of

Dibdin’s Arabian-themed The Magic of Orosmanes; or, Harlequin Slave and Sultan.Dibdin confines the Arabian characters to the short sung scenes of the work, whileHarlequin and the Clown mime the narratives of the other scenes which were thenwritten out in full in the book. As is often found in this type of pantomime, thecharacters, which include a dwarf, a dragon, and other grotesques in the different

30 Public Advertiser (25 December 1782).31 See Jonathan R. Dull, ‘Diplomacy of the Revolution, to 1783’, in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

(eds), A Companion to the American Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 359–60.

Michael Burden52



scenes, do not connect until the final denouement.32 Another such pantomimedates from after Dibdin’s departure, although before his last work for the Circus.This was The Vicissitudes of Harlequin, which had recitatives and arias byMr Brookes, scenery by Michael Novosielski, and dresses and decorations bySignor Lusina.33 Its importance lies in the fact that the management was movingto improve the standard of the music and production; here the sets were designedby Novosielski, a scene designer associated with the Opera House. A similarsituation pertains to the ballets, which included stories on classical legends suchas Admetus and Alceste and Bacchus and Ariadne. The advertised dancers includenames of performers who also appeared at the Opera House, and these offeringsseem to have been consistently successful, perhaps part of a deliberate move toupstage rivals such as Astley.34A key part of any theatre’s success was being alive to the fluctuating demands and

tastes of the public. The popular Mandarine; or, The Refusal of Harlequin was ‘laidaside’ for a week to ensure the bills contained adequate variety. However, the publichad clearly become attached to the ‘Temple of Chinese Fire’ it contained, so themanagement staged this separately, tacked on to the ballet of Admetus and Alceste.35The programmes also included commemorations of royal events in shows thatoften had illuminations and fireworks; in 1783, for one show, the managementdecorated the three centre windows of the building with transparencies, andprovided ‘a large quantity of rockets, air balloons, pots debrins, l’aigrettes, andother Italian air works’.36 Such displays were typical ploys found at the minortheatres such as the earlier Goodman’s Fields,37 where the managements, primarilyengaged in drawing the public’s attention, were not interested in whether theoccasion itself was of importance. And this one was no exception: the eventbeing marked here was ‘the Anniversary of the birth-day of the Prince of Wales,who entered the 22d year of his age’,38 which, for the sake of ‘rejoicing’, was made ageneral occasion of the sort that the theatre management was keen to exploit.Dibdin’s name is not headlined in the bills until after 18 October 1783; here it

was announced that the music was ‘conducted in the immediate inspection’ ofDibdin.39 The music that accompanied the works mentioned above would havebeen incidental music, and sometimes improvised; much of it was probably not tiedto any individual show. His more formal works for the Circus included burlettas,intermezzos, serenatas, and pantomimes, although not operas, the designation of

32 Charles Dibdin, The Magic of Orosmanes; or, Harlequin Slave and Sultan: a Pantomime, Drawnfrom the Arabian Legends (London, 1785), 14.

33 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (22 June 1784).34 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (19 November 1783). The connections extended

further; see the Morning Post (28 February 1785), where the tradesmen who publicly supportedHughes included Thomas Luppino, ‘36 years taylor at the Opera House’.

35 Parker’s General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer (11 November 1782).36 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (11 August 1783).37 See, for example, Michael Burden, ‘The Wedding Masques for Anne, the Princess Royal’,

Miscellanea Musicologica 17 (1990): 87–113.38 General Evening Post (9–12 August 1783).39 See, for example, Public Advertiser (24 October 1783).




which would have drawn the attention of the patent theatres eager to protect theirlicense. The term ‘intermezzo’ was used to describe the small Italian operas that hadtheir origins in the comic scenes between the acts of opera seria; it came into use inLondon in about 1750. Confusingly, these works were also called ‘burlettas’: theGiordani Company largely responsible for performing them was described as a‘burletta company’, and the 1759 and 1771 London-printed sources of La ServaPadrona referred to it as a ‘burletta’.40 However, in the 1760s, ‘burletta’ was thenthe designation given to a British imitation commissioned by Lord Mornington;here the work became an all-sung piece using mythological figures and a classicalstory. The first work in this new genre, Kane O’Hara’s Midas, was staged inLondon in 1766; other works such as The Golden Pippin and The Judgment ofParis followed, including an important one by Dibdin, Poor Vulcan! (1778).41 Thegenre then ceased to be thought of as all-sung, when according to George Colmanthe Younger, the burlesque tragedy Tom Thumb, revived at Covent Garden in1780, was ‘inadvertently announced by the managers . . . as a burletta’.42 As we findin one of Dibdin’s pieces for the Circus, The Graces, such a designation could becombined with others, this one being called an ‘intermezzo of demi-character’,thereby harnessing the term intermezzo to refer to its general function and possiblyto its single act, and employing the dance term ‘demi-character’ to suggest thetelling of a story through the spoken text.43‘Burletta’ was, then, used to describe works such as the above-mentioned Cestus

which were a kind of mythological burlesque. Dibdin’s score for Cestus is moresophisticated than one might suppose from the context of the work. It consists ofthree da capo arias for Romanzini, and one each for Seymour and Wilkinson,through-composed airs for Sestini and Seymour, multi-versed airs for Romanzini,Seymour, and Wilkinson, and a da capo duet for Romanzini and Wilkinson as thefinale.44 Da capo arias are not what one would expect at the Circus or in a worksung by children; indeed, it might be said to be pretentious. However, the score andtitle page of the Cestus libretto both designate the work a ‘serenata’, which mightsuggest that Dibdin was trying to elevate the work above a group of mere ditties. Infact, the term in eighteenth-century London was usually used to describe worksthat were serious, often having an occasional function. It did not otherwise implyany particular traits, with one exception: it meant that the work, even if performedin costume, had no action. This use of the term in London originated in Handel’s

40 See Richard G. King and Saskia Willaert, ‘Giovanni Francesco Crosa and the First Italian ComicOperas in London, Brussels and Amsterdam, 1748–50’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 118/2(1993): 246–75; The Favourite Songs in La Serva Padrona (London, 1759), GB-Ob Harding Mus.H 5 (6); and The Servant Mistress (London, 1770), GB-Lbl 11630.d.4.(18).

41 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 318–22.42 Richard Brinsley Peake, Memoirs of the Colman Family, Including their Correspondence (London,

1841), 398, and see 396–400 for an extended discussion of the matter; see also Michael Burden, ‘TheWriting and Staging of Georgian Romantic Opera’, in Swindells and Taylor,Handbook of the GeorgianTheatre, 424–41.

43 Charles Dibdin, The Graces, an Intermezzo in One Act. As it is Performed at the Royal Circus, inSt. George’s Fields (London, 1782).

44 Charles Dibdin, The Cestus: a Serenata as Performed at the Royal Circus (London, [1783]).

Michael Burden54



performances of his masque, Acis and Galatea (1718), which had been pirated bythe English Opera Company at the Little Haymarket theatre in 1732; Handel’sresponse was to perform it with ‘no Action on the Stage’ but where ‘the Scenewill represent, in a Picturesque Manner, a Rural Prospect, with Rocks, Groves,Fountains, and Grotto’s; amongst which will be disposed a Chorus of Nymphs andShepherds, the Habits and every other decoration suited to the Subject’.45 Handel’swheeze stuck, and not only was Acis and Galatea then frequently performed underthe label of a ‘serenata’, but William Boyce composed what became the best-knownserenata of the eighteenth century, Solomon, which was performed in this manner.When Dibdin composed works in this genre, then, he was writing in a mode wellunderstood by his audience, and of course, a work ‘with costume and no action’could be utilized for the allegorical scenes, and had the added advantage that it wasmore easily performed by children. Dibdin’s approach represented an attempt tolink the music at the Circus with established and well-regarded precedents, whilegiving them a novel twist, through the use of children or their combination withequestrian events.

FAILURE: THE ROYAL CIRCUS EPITOMIZED

As the evidence above suggests, Dibdin was instrumental in building the Circusinto a competitive, innovative form of public entertainment. Yet his time thereended in quarrels, arguments, and litigation. Never at a loss with a pen in his hand,Dibdin took his arguments into the public realm via a pamphlet, The Royal CircusEpitomized. A highly readable work of vitriol and self-justification, it is a moreinteresting and immediate account—including more (probable) facts—than thenarrative in the later and more considered The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin.The dedicatory text of the The Royal Circus Epitomized was, however, far from thetypical flattery one might expect to find in such circumstances. Dibdin denouncesits dedicatee, William Davis, boldly claiming that it will be impossible for others totrust Davis in business after his ‘despicable treatment’ of the composer. This isfollowed by an advertisement, a ‘Humble Petition’, two epigrams, ‘A MoralComparison’, ‘A dispute between Jew Ball and Jew Friendship’, and the EquestrianCreed, which describes the proprietors (a merchant, a surgeon, a sportsman, and anattorney) as being ignoramuses: ‘the stupidity is equal, the absurdity eternal’.46 Theparodied literary forms in which the material was expressed were all part of Dibdin’sattack, and the contents of his venomous document thus reveals much about thefailure of Dibdin, Hughes, Grimaldi, and the proprietors to work together success-fully in a line of business that demanded collaborative methods of production.One of the key lines of dispute was the question of licences. The Royal Circus

was, of course, outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain, but it was not outof range of the Surrey magistrates, who gave permission for such venues in this part

45 Daily Post (5 June 1733).46 Charles Dibdin, The Royal Circus Epitomized (London, 1784), xi.




of London. Among the important information Dibdin reveals is that he supportedopening the Circus without a licence. The problem the promoters faced was thatthe Magistrates met on such matters only at Michaelmas, which had just passed.Dibdin, clearly anxious about securing the competitiveness of the new Circus,claimed that to wait would mean that the Circus would be unable to capitalize onthe ‘universal curiosity’ about the new venture, that the ‘seeds of opposition’ to theapplication were already sown, and that the arena was already gaining a (false)reputation as a venue for rope-dancing and tumbling, drinking and gambling.47 Inessence, Dibdin’s argument was that if the theatre opened quickly and was seen tobe run with propriety, then a licence would be forthcoming. What he claimed tofear was what in fact happened: the building work slowed up, the proprietorsapplied at a late stage for a licence, which was then refused (according to Dibdin) asa result of false and scandalous reports spread by the Circus’s rivals. The theatrethen opened anyway on 4 November 1782, not only without a licence, but with alicence having been refused; by 15 November the magistrates had closed it down.As all the personnel were already engaged by the Circus, Dibdin proposed that

the theatre open again with what he called ‘a mode of amusement unlike anythingwe had done before’; these were the allegories discussed above. While in counsel’sopinion this was fine, the magistrates disagreed, and the performances precipitatedHughes’s arrest on 27 December 1782. Found innocent, Hughes then reopenedthe theatre without a licence, and managed it successfully through to September1783. However, when the licence was granted for the following season starting18October, onlyHughes’s name seems to have been associated with it, but, accordingto Dibdin, the season went well despite the costs associated with bringing out his newFairyWorld programme.48The theatre closed at the beginning ofDecember, and thenreopened at Christmas. Dibdin opposed this reopening on the grounds that nothingwas new, emphasizing the importance of novelty to success; in fact, as he feared, itcaused ‘universal dissatisfaction’, and Dibdin was blamed for the fiasco.This narrative is a counterpoint to another key line of dispute: the failure of the

proprietors to come to any contractual agreement with Hughes and Dibdin overtheir payments. Much of the information provided by Dibdin is rudimentary, butin essence, the proprietors seem on several occasions to have changed the nature ofthe profit-share they proposed to both Dibdin and Hughes, each time on the basisof their own increasing expenses. However, for the successful run from 15March to27 September 1783, Dibdin does tell us clearly that although the proposedmemorandum never materialized, he and Hughes did in fact receive a quarter ofthe profits every Saturday.49 But he was pained to discover that ‘neither Mr Hughesnor myself were to have the liberty, without the consent of the committee topublish any book’.50 Without the books, Dibdin could gain no extra income of thekind that was usually part of a librettist’s remuneration: as he said, ‘the prohibitionof publications struck particularly hard’ with him.51 He believed what he was told:that the clause was aimed at curbing Hughes, who might publish words ‘to the

47 Ibid., 11. 48 Ibid., 35. 49 Ibid., 22. 50 Ibid., 25–7. 51 Ibid., 25.

Michael Burden56



disgrace of the concern’,52 and was assured that the words and music of his pieceswere not implied in the clause. To compound the problem, Hughes attempted toseize the advantage and drive Dibdin out of the theatre by persuading his creditorsto pursue him. These financial tensions were perhaps an endemic feature ofcollaborative methods of production, which left some feeling the profits of theirhard work were disproportionately benefiting their colleagues. Dibdin later sawconspiracy behind every move: ‘While the leech Hughes, was sucking the blood ofthe proprietors, and fastening on the concern, the serpent Grimaldi, was coiled uptill a proper opportunity arrived to seize the management.’53 In the end, Dibdinlost the battle; by the time of the winter closure on 7 February 1784, Dibdin wasgone, voted out of the Circus by the proprietors, William Davis, George Grant,Richard Harbourne, Thomas Bullock (for Sir John Lade), and Thomas West (forMr West).54

ENVOI

Yet, remarkably, Hughes and Dibdin did attempt to run the Royal Circus again as apartnership: Dibdin claimed that Hughes approached him some time in early1785, and they laid claim to the institution from February.55 After a month’s tit-for-tat advertising over the matter, on 19March an agreement was reached betweenthe proprietors, and Hughes and Dibdin as managers,56 and the Circus opened forbusiness again on 28 March. But despite the advertising of programmes ‘on a newplan and infinitely superior to things before attempted’,57 the bills themselveslooked similar, and although things went well for about five weeks after opening,the situation between the two men rapidly deteriorated. Dibdin then quit theCircus for good.This final episode in Dibdin’s connection with the Royal Circus is a telling sign

of the importance of collaboration to the success of such ventures. Since it wasbased on the principle of miscellaneous mixing of forms and genres of entertain-ment, without Dibdin’s musical expertise, the theatre had evidently failed to thrive.Dibdin’s time at the Circus opens up a window into the competitive dynamicsdriving the rapid expansion and development of the minor theatres in this period.London was beginning to be able to support a range of theatres and spaces ofcommercial entertainment, beyond its traditional theatres royal and the OperaHouse, but it was a tough and demanding market in which to operate. Securing theedge over the competition—whether through a more advantageous location, amore elegant building, grander spectacle, more elaborate music, enticing novelties,or a more entertaining mix of genres and forms—was vital to the way in which theRoyal Circus project was conceived and run. Such strategies for success in the world

52 Ibid. 53 Life, 1:111. 54 Dibdin, Royal Circus, 22.55 See Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (25–26 February 1785).56 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (21 March 1785).57 Public Advertiser (23 March 1785).




of the minor theatres occur again in the life of Charles Dibdin the Younger, whoselater management of Sadler’s Wells Susan Valladares explores in Chapter Nine ofthis volume.This narrative does, however, also highlight some of the pitfalls lurking for the

unwary theatrical entrepreneur: the vagaries of ad-hoc licensing laws in areasbeyond the traditional Cities of London and Westminster; tensions over profitshares and ownership of works; and disagreements over management, exacerbatedby differences in personal temperament. Eventually, of course, Dibdin found asolution to this problem in the one-man show, but, as noted in the Introduction tothis volume, we should perhaps resist this all-too-teleological interpretation offeredby The Professional Life. Instead, the Royal Circus episode was inspired by and drewupon the collaborative methods of production Dibdin had developed during hisearly career working in various capacities for the London theatres. Dibdin’srepresentation of it as flawed, dissatisfying, and problematic is strongly colouredby his later success as a solo performer. But while Dibdin became progressively lessenamoured by the collaborative methods of the minor theatres, and his complaintswere increasingly echoed by a range of early-nineteenth-century critics (as JimDavis shows in Chapter Ten of this volume), this style of production—innovative,varied, entertaining—continued as the basis of the minor theatres’ success far intothe nineteenth century.

Michael Burden58



Interlude 1Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield

Voicing the Clown in Town

Katie Osborn

Charles Dibdin frequently took up an important borderland for the late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century writer: the intersection between the metropolis andthe countryside; between civilized, modern ways of speaking (which he eagerlyparodies) and the real language of men (which he gleefully mimics). His song‘Joltering Giles’, for example, stages an encounter between a ‘sturdy clown’ andtwo gentlemen from the city. The farm labourer is introduced with comic archaiclanguage: ‘HARK! with what glee yon sturdy clown, / Reasons, remarks, andsows.’1 But when he speaks to the city men, he uses a bouncing rustic dialect:

A vrend to all the country round,My labours all regale:Twas I the barley put i’ the ground,That brew’d th’ exciseman’s ale;The wheat I zow with even hand,To thousands shall give bread:—Why there’s no king or ’squire o’ the landZo many mouths ha’ ved.

Robin Ganev connects this image of the helpful rustic to how rural life isdepicted in many ballads, including Dibdin’s.2 The ‘clown’ also appears in muchof the poetry of Robert Bloomfield, a contemporary labouring-class poet whoadmired Dibdin’s songs and poetry. His poem The Farmer’s Boy portrays another,very similar Giles, describing the farm boy’s work as ‘constant chearful servitude’.3In both men’s works, the term ‘clown’ invokes the minstrel-like persona of theuneducated labourer many consumers of songs and poetry embraced—a figure

1 ‘Joltering Giles’, from one of Dibdin’s Sans Souci Entertainments: The Selected Songs of CharlesDibdin (London, 1845), 591. Interestingly, the 1839 version is not written in dialect: The Songs ofCharles Dibdin, 2 vols (London, 1839), 1:161–3.

2 Robin Ganev, Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 112.

3 The Farmer’s Boy, in Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems: Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. JohnLucas and John Goodridge (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007), line 30.



‘deferential, dependent and ignorant’.4 The project of revising this deferential‘clown’ had a personal appeal to Dibdin and Bloomfield, both largely self-taught,and both invested in their personal narratives of natural genius. In both Dibdin’sand Bloomfield’s works, the figure of the clown conjures the intersections ofcountryside and metropolis, artifice and nature. The rustic, with his innate senseand his appearance of candour, becomes an attractive image of riddling satire, afigure thrust into—and by nature outside of—dominant metropolitan culture.Anticipating David Kennerley’s description of Dibdin’s self-fashioning in

Chapter Five, this study proposes that Dibdin and Bloomfield used dialect andrusticity in their works to assert themselves as independent comic voices. Bothimmigrants to London, Dibdin and Bloomfield used country voices to assertthemselves as more ‘plain-speaking, open, [and] independent’ than their cityneighbours. Born in Suffolk, Bloomfield moved to London as an adolescent tobecome a shoemaker, and eventually made a tenuous living from his writing.Dibdin likewise moved to London at a young age, and lived in many ways a ratherhardscrabble actor’s life. Asserting themselves as natural and sincere, both men alsoclung fiercely to their reputations as autodidacts. Dibdin claimed in his autobiog-raphy, ‘The music I have was strongly in my mind from my earliest remembrance,and I know that no master could at any time have been of the least service to me.It lay quietly a hidden spark, which, in the country, found nothing ardent enough tovivify it; but, coming in contact with its proper fuel, the different performances intown, it at once expanded, and nothing could keep it within bounds.’5 Bloomfieldsimilarly found his muse while living in the city, though again and again hereturned, like Dibdin, to rural scenes and rustic characters. Finally, both menwere deeply interested in ways of representing the language of the countryside toLondon audiences, an aspect of Dibdin’s work that has been overlooked by many ofhis modern readers. In this respect this interlude is a contribution to a growingbody of work on dialect as an often ambivalent political tool in the Romanticperiod. Stephen Dornan, for example, argues that dialect texts may appear simpleand even clownish, but they simultaneously have a special potential to disorient andestrange readers.6 There is almost always, Dornan argues, a correlation betweendialect use and ‘oppositional perspectives on politics and society’.7 Dibdin andBloomfield’s rustic types, however, do not represent a clear radical or levellingpolitics so much as they offer an opportunity for the poet or songster to asserthimself as an independent and creative authority. As Harriet Guest describes atlength in Chapter Eight of this volume, Dibdin (and Bloomfield) asserted theirvirtuosity through the coining of various voices, perspectives, and rhythms.

4 Mark Freeman, ‘The Agricultural Labourer and the “Hodge” Stereotype, c.1850–1914’,Agricultural History Review 49 (2001): 172–86, 174.

5 Life, 1:21–2.6 R. Stephen Dornan, ‘Radical Politics and Dialect in the British Archipelago’, in John Kirk,

Andrew Noble, and Michael Brown (eds), United Islands? The Languages of Resistance (London:Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 169–79, 172.

7 Ibid., 170.

Katie Osborn60



Bloomfield andDibdin’s careers bring into focus the fact thatmusic, a predominantlyperformative mode of expression, and poetry, a predominantly textual mode, werestill closely tied in the late-eighteenth-century world. Rising literacy levels, greateraccess to print, and increased travel between the metropolis and the countryside(and among the four nations) meant that by the end of the eighteenth century,traditional ‘oral’ rural culture and metropolitan print culture overlapped as neverbefore.8 Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) capitalized on thisintersection and exerted a powerful influence over Dibdin, Bloomfield, and thedevelopment of what we now consider mainstream Romantic poetry. One reasonfor the success of Bloomfield’s poetry in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary market was its savvy borrowing from both high cultural, neoclassicalworks such as Stephen Duck’s Thresher’s Labour and James Thomson’s The Seasonsand, simultaneously, very modern works such as Dibdin’s songs and (their professedantiquity notwithstanding) Percy’s ballad collections. Almost everything Bloomfieldpublished was classified by the poet as ‘songs’, some with directions for accompany-ing music.9 In addition, Bloomfield fiddled, versified ‘Hook’s music lessons’,attended London entertainments, and wrote a musical entertainment himself.10His first and most successful long poem, The Farmer’s Boy (1800), and his later ruralballads profess to tell ‘untold tales’: histories from below that are connected with ‘reallife’ because of his rural labouring experience.11 Many of Dibdin’s impersonationsongs—such as ‘Joltering Giles’, ‘The Gardener’, ‘The Waggoner’, ‘The Tinker’,and ‘The Woodman’—find their humour in this appeal to authenticity, especiallywhen the songs juxtapose the old-fashioned rustic and themodern city man.Which,Dibdin seems to ask, is themore absurd: the foppish spark, or the riddling bumpkin?Bloomfield was an avid and critical attendee at London entertainments of various

kinds, as several comments in his letters and Remains show. He invokes his affinitywith Dibdin in the preface to his last volume of poetry, May-day with the Muses(1822). Bloomfield writes, ‘I never found any thing to strike my mind so forcibly asthe last stanza of Dibdin’s “Sailor’s Journal” . . .This, to my feelings, is a balm at alltimes; it is spirit, animation, and imagery, all at once.’12 Bloomfield may have seenDibdin perform it: he moved to London at the age of fifteen in 1781, and lived

8 Philip Connell and Nigel Leask, ‘What is the People?’, in their Romanticism and Popular Culturein Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9–21.

9 ‘The Man in the Moon’ and ‘Irish News’ were both set to popular tunes: The Works of RobertBloomfield (London, 1867), 318, 320.

10 Bloomfield’s last publication, Hazelwood Hall, was a five-act play for which he composed severalsongs. At some point Bloomfield also set words (on rural themes) to several of Hook’s music lessons.He may have been inspired, or vice versa, by John Kelly’s work, advertised in the British Critic in 1814.Kelly’s verses, unlike Bloomfield’s, are purely didactic: ‘Thus from C, if we move to the Fifth degreehigher, / By such transposition, one Sharp we acquire’ (New Series, 2:434). Compare to Bloomfield’s‘For Hook’s Ninth Lesson’: ‘Down in the forest / Where the hazel boughs are spreading, / Where sun-beams gleaming play’ (Works, 314).

11 For a discussion of the way rural and labouring-class balladeers used labour to legitimize theirexpressions, see Ganev, Songs of Protest, 112.

12 Bloomfield, Selected Poems, 138–9. Bloomfield’s editors wrongly identify the author of ‘TheSailor’s Journal’ as Dibdin’s son, Thomas John Dibdin: ibid., 192.

61Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield



there consistently after 1784.13 The ‘Sailor’s Journal’ was composed for andperformed at Dibdin’s Royal Circus entertainment Will o’ the Wisp in 1785.14 Itis tantalizing to imagine Bloomfield attending one of Dibdin’s private theatricals,for the poet seems to have little relish for large public venues. His satire ‘A Visit toRanelagh’, occasioned by the Peace of Amiens, dryly depicts the response a rustic‘clown’might have to urban sights—a situation Dibdin may himself have witnessedin his tenure as musical director at Ranelagh in the late 1760s. Bloomfield’s rusticspeaker is unimpressed with urban spectacles:

A thousand feet rustled on mats,A carpet that once had been green;Men bow’d with their outlandish hats,With corners so fearfully keen!Fair maids, who at home in their haste,Had left all clothing else but a train,Swept the floor clean, as slowly they pac’d,And then—walk’d round and swept it again.The music was truly enchanting!Right glad was I when I came near it;But in fashion I found I was wanting:—’Twas the fashion to walk and not hear it!A fine youth, as beauty beset him,Look’d smilingly on the train;‘The king’s nephew’, they cried, as they met;Then—we went round and met him again.15

Each more-or-less anapaestic stanza ends with the same refrain, ‘and then we wentround it again’—a pun on the round architecture of Ranelagh. ‘What wonderswere there to be found’, the poet asks, ‘That a clown might enjoy or disdain?’The rural speaker compares metropolitan spectacles to rural ones: a bell rings,announcing not the end of a workday but ‘new pleasures’; people cover the yard as‘a white flock’; and blue fireworks resemble rain. In the end, the rustic finds thepractice of urban life repetitive and empty; the wonders of the king’s head, thewomen’s dresses, and the music all lose their allure on a second viewing (and third,and fourth).Bloomfield’s poem shares much with Dibdin’s song ‘The Bumpkin in Town’.

Like Bloomfield’s, Dibdin’s bumpkin is unconcerned with rank, placing himselfand the man of a higher status on even footing:

What tho’ I be a country clown?For all the fuss you make,One need not to be born in town

13 Lucas, Introduction to Bloomfield, Selected Poems, 15. It is more probable that Bloomfield eitherowned or borrowed a printed copy of the poem, since he quotes several lines of it (ibid., 139).

14 Edward Rimbault Dibdin, ‘A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Charles Dibdin’, Notesand Queries 9 (31 May 1902): 422.

15 ‘A Visit to Ranelagh’, Works, 198–200.

Katie Osborn62



To know what two and two make.. . .

Then do not be so proud, d’ye see,It ’ent a thing that’s suiting;Can one than t’other better be,When both are on a footing?16

Here and inmany other poems, the riddling rustic seems to triumph over slow-witted,fashion-obsessedmetropolitans. In fact,Dibdin poked fun at both bumpkins and city-dwellers. Dibdin’s ‘The Joys of the Country’ is perhaps his clearest illustration of boththe troubles of country life and the absurdity of pastoral nostalgia:

Where nature to smile when she joyful inclines,And the sun charms us all the year round when it shines:. . .

There we pop at the wild ducks, and frighten the crows,While so lovely the icicles hang to our clothes.17

For Bloomfield, rural people would always be what Dibdin called (referring to theRoyal Navy, that remorselessly modern institution) ‘the natural bulwark of theircountry’.18 In most of Dibdin’s songs, however, rural labour and rural culture aremerely given lip service as important parts of Englishness, due in part perhaps to whatJudith Hawley describes in Chapter Six of this volume: Dibdin’s attempt to assertan independent but ultimatelymasculine art. That his bumpkins are nearly alwaysmaledoes not mean they are not also ultimately dismissed as humorously naive andbackwards, when compared to the equally ridiculous—but thoroughly modern—city man.

16 The Selected Songs, 233–4. 17 The Songs, 2:20–1. 18 Life, 1:xxii.

63Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield



4The Detail is in The DevilDibdin’s Patriotism in the 1780s

David O’Shaughnessy

From the very outset of the eighteenth century, newspapers were seen as central tothe activities of the recent mixed constitutional arrangement in Britain and one ofits organizing principles of ‘liberty’, however woollily that term might be defined.The Daily Courant was London’s first daily newspaper from March 1702 andoutlined its vision in one of its earliest issues:

It will be found from the Foreign Prints, which from time to time, as Occasion offers,will be mention’d in this Paper, that the Author has taken Care to be duly furnish’dwith all that comes from Abroad in any Language. And for an Assurance that he willnot, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impose any Additions of feign’dCircumstances to an Action, but give his Extracts fairly and Impartially; at theBeginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence ’tis taken,that the Publick, seeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowanceof that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairness of theRelation: Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own,but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough tomake Reflections for themselves.1

The Courant’s intention to offer impartial information and to refrain from introdu-cing personal bias, its engagement with the events of other European countries, and,most importantly, its declaration of faith in its readership ‘to have Sense enough tomake Reflections for themselves’mark the nascent newspaper industry as one whichwas conceived of as central to the experience of the Enlightenment in Britain. Thesesentiments were voiced as print culture flourished and were only heightened in thewake of the John Wilkes affair.2 But the 1780s was arguably the most significantdecade of activity and growth for London—and thus British—newspapers.3 That

1 Daily Courant (19 March 1702).2 See Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c.1780–1850 (London: Home & Van Thal, 1949),

35–6, and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England,1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–36.

3 Regional newspapers were very dependent on London newspapers for material even if they werehighly selective and followed their own political lines. SeeHannahBarker,Newspapers, Politics, and PublicOpinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95–8 and passim.



decade saw a number of important daily newspapers commence publication: theMorning Herald and Daily Advertiser (1780), the Daily Universal Register (1785,which became The Times in 1788), and The World (1787). But, more significantly,as documented by LucyleWerkmeister, newspaper practices changed markedly overthe decade as titles proliferated. Werkmeister suggests that the 1770s and 1780s sawthe decline of the advertiser model and the concomitant rise of the ‘scandal sheet’.Werkmeister also documents the increasing importance of ‘puffing’ and newspapersubsidy by persons of quality and, in particular, by political parties.4Werkmeister’s conclusions have been challenged more recently by Hannah

Barker, who argues that the newspapers were much more independent of politicalsubsidy than Werkmeister allowed. For Barker, the economics of newspapers wereparamount: the profit motive meant that outright political control of press titles bypolitical groupings was most unlikely. Rather, consistent political lines taken byparticular newspapers were arrived at with a degree of independence and aimed atmaintaining a loyal readership: ‘The need to maintain extensive distributions meantthat newspapers were dependent not upon political patronage, but upon theirappeal to readers. The political debate which took place in the capital’s press wasthus far more open and less dependent on Westminster than would have been thecase if newspapers had been mere party organs.’5 A noted feature of Barker’s book isher emphasis on the 1780s as the key period, an observation that is supported by asomewhat exasperated Charles Dibdin who, towards the end of that decade,recalled a simpler time:

I have to speak of newspapers; and the first thing I shall say is, that it is astonishing tosee how they multiply. I remember when The Daily Advertiser, The Public Advertiser,The Gazetteer, The Ledger, and two evening papers, made up—except The Craftsmanon a Saturday—the whole stock of public prints in LONDON, and one, or at most twopapers in a county, contented the people in the country; and really, at that time, therewas something like independent principles in the conduct of the public prints.6

Newspaper and theatre historians would both agree that the growth of newspaperswas facilitated by an increasing public interest in the theatres, theatrical perform-ances, and the lives of actors and actresses. Dibdin, best known as a patrioticEnglish songwriter, was also a keen observer of newspapers and theatres and sorelyfelt the loss of the press’s ‘independent principles’. This chapter will adumbratethese observations through a consideration of his first foray into the world ofperiodical publication, The Devil (1786–7). While it is hoped that this will offeranother perspective on Dibdin’s contribution to metropolitan cultural activity, theessay will complement Barker’s argument by showing that Dibdin’s antagonismtowards newspapers and theatres was largely motivated by a patriotic belief thattheir capitulation to commercial forces amounted to a betrayal of their public-sphere responsibilities. So while Werkmeister may have overstated the extent of

4 Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1772–1792 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1963), 1–18.

5 Barker, Newspapers, 4. 6 Musical Tour, 428.

65The Detail is in The Devil



political influence on newspapers, it is also fair to say that Barker has not fullyaccounted for the particular influence of theatres on London’s press. Despite theostensible differences and public spats between newspapers, the thrust of Dibdin’scritique is that the industry is a cosy commercial oligarchy in which proprietors andeditors profit through the betrayal of the ideals in which the liberty of the press isgrounded. Likewise, theatres have similarly reneged on their duty to offer exemplarsof moral behaviour in a decorous fashion by being seduced by spectacle, sensation-alism, and foreign influences.

THE DEVIL

Looking back on the publication of The Devil in his Professional Life, Dibdinreflects with a typical mélange of ruefulness and bitterness:

Exasperated to the uttermost, I published, perhaps imprudently, a hebdomadal work,called The Devil. It had, for a time, a most astonishing sale; four thousand of the firstnumber were sold in one day. It was impossible, however, to carry on a plan of thiswork without managing it by a confederacy; and this confederacy, as might naturallybe expected, betrayed me; they connived at a counter publication, played a hundredunhandsome tricks, and, I grew tired and relinquished mine; not, however, till one-and-twenty numbers had made their appearance.7

Dibdin’s exasperation in 1786 emanated from a number of sources. His partner-ship with Colonel West and others that built the Royal Circus and PhilharmonicAcademy on the Surrey shore of the Thames had collapsed and the legal action hetook to secure his share of the assets was unsuccessful in 1784. A second project tobuild a theatre near St Pancras also failed to get off the ground, but not before helost £290. Dibdin also claimed that Richard Daly, who managed Dublin’s SmockAlley theatre, reneged on a deal for musical works and only paid about a quarter ofwhat was agreed. In the wake of these disappointments, Dibdin retreated to avillage near Southampton, where he wrote his novel The Younger Brother, subse-quently rejected by a London publisher (but later published in 1793). Thecumulative toll these setbacks must have taken on him goes some way to explainingthe rather splenetic tone of The Devil.Dibdin’s weekly periodical was first published on 2 October 1786 by Samuel

William Fores.8 Priced at two pence, it was ‘A Review and Investigation of allPublic Subjects Whatever’ which included ‘Literature, Arts, Arms, Commerce,Men, Measures, the Court, the Cabinet, the Senate, the Bar, the Pulpit, and theStage’.9 The conceit of the periodical is that the Editor is on the point of suicide dueto the recent death of his wife when the Devil intervenes to dissuade him. The

7 Life, 2:189. Dibdin’s recollection is mistaken; there were in fact twenty-two issues of The Devil.8 Fores (1761?–1838) operated out of Piccadilly and is best known for the sale of satirical prints

that largely supported the Pitt side during the French Revolutionary period.9 Title page of The Devil (2 October 1786).

David O’Shaughnessy66



Devil delivers a vitriolic diatribe against the manners of the age that works its waythrough the corruption of the nobility and judiciary, and the degeneration of thetheatres and newspapers. Inspired, the Editor resolves to begin a weekly paper thatwill be written ‘in the manner of the Spectator’ at which point the Devil interjectsagain testily:

‘The Spectator!’ exclaimed he—‘if you could have the assistance of Addison and all hisfriends, with the united abilities of all the ancients and all the moderns, you would notsell an hundred in a year. I have furnished you with some hints, which are but as a grainof wheat in a field, compared to the number you shall receive fromme, if you prosecuteyour design upon any feasible principle.—But the Spectator in this age!—no; if youwould sell your work otherwise than by weight, take care to have enough in it of theDevil.’ (1:10)

Allusions to Addison and Steele’s seminal work crop up repeatedly in Dibdin’s TheDevil. Like the Spectator, the title page states that the periodical is the production ofa ‘Society of LITERARY GENTLEMEN’ and Dibdin draws on a number ofliterary personae for many of the articles, but there is no evidence that anyoneother than Dibdin was the author.10 The Devil also claims to eschew party politics,attacking politicians and newspapers aligned to both political parties. Dibdin isfond of printing correspondence in the pages of his periodical, much of whichappears to be genuine, although some of which must also be read through theplayful lens of the Spectator no.542, which gleefully celebrates the capacity ofcorrespondence to disguise the authorial voice. The second issue of The Devildeliberately echoes that of the Spectator when it begins: ‘It was my first intentionto have given in this Second Number, a particular description of the differentcharacters which compose our Society’ (1:19). Yet, as the Devil’s splutteringinterjection above suggests, these references serve mostly to point out that thepromise and ambition of the public sphere imagined by the Spectator has failed tobe realized and London’s public institutions are feeble and corrupt shadows of howthey were imagined nearly a century earlier. The suggestion is that a disinterestedpublication with a view to the public good is no longer possible: to succeed in late-eighteenth-century London, one must be driven by spleen or profit (and the formeroften leads to the latter). And it is clear from the opening issue that the centraltargets of The Devil will be the newspapers and the theatres. Newspapers haveabandoned their claims to be vehicles of rational-critical discourse and now appealto party sensationalism:

‘Reason!’ interrupted the Devil,—‘the term, and the use of it, is exploded. No, no, youhave nothing for it, if you must write, but flattery or abuse. Read the two favouritenewspapers;—in one you shall see the legislature, and the members who compose it,

10 The ODNB entry for John Williams, better known as Anthony Pasquin, claims that he was theauthor of The Devil. However, I have found no evidence to support this. Dibdin himself does notrefer to any other contributors. Moreover, Dibdin had come under attack by Pasquin in his popularsatire on London’s acting community The Children of Thespis (London, 1786). Given that Pasquinattacks Dibdin rather vituperatively in this work, it seems improbable that they would havecollaborated.




treated with the vilest and lowest scurrility, as if ministers and their fate hung at themercy of every ragged author employed to fabricate the lie of the day; . . . In one, theMinistry is all vice—in the other, all virtue;—a circumstance that never did, nor neverwill distinguish any ministry in the universe.

‘The other prints sell in proportion as they lean to party; for there is no medium inthis country. All men are rascals, or angels, as they are spoken of by their opponents oradherents.’ (1:8)

Concomitantly, the Devil argues that the degraded state of the British theatre isignored due to the vested financial interests of the newspapers and the theatres, eachdependent on the other for sales in a corrupt symbiotic partnership:

On the subject of theatre, indeed, [newspapers] are all agreed; actors, authors, andmusicians—though the first imitate, the second steal, and the third compile—are withthem arrived to the highest pitch of perfection, when ’tis notorious the theatres havegradually declined for these last fifteen years . . . . But the inducement is evident; andwhile free admission, and now and then the reception of a farce, can insure thenewspapers, trash must go down; and the new school, as it is called, impotent as itis, be palmed on the rising generation, as an improvement of the old one; though,Heaven knows! a spider’s web may with as much propriety be instanced as animprovement on the labours of a silk worm. (1:8–9)

Over the two volumes and twenty-two issues of The Devil published between2 October 1786 and 22 February 1787, Dibdin remains focused on these twoforums of London culture and political life in the pages of what is best described asa satirical miscellany, the mode with which he is so closely associated.In the opening issue, the Editor cites theMorning Post and theMorning Herald as

particularly egregious examples of the sort of partisan editorial lines being taken bythe London newspapers as a whole.11 He refers to them as Jalap (Herald) andIpecahuanha (Post), respectively a natural cathartic and emetic, an image thatanticipates Gillray’s ‘Cornucopia of Ignorance’ and one in keeping with thescatological tendencies of contemporary political caricature.12 Although the publicimage they maintain is of rank hostility, in fact the papers rely on each other forcommercial sustenance. The Editor is determined to demonstrate ‘in what mannerthey agree amicably in private, to affront one another in the face of the world ’ (1:11).They sacrifice—quite cynically—their responsibility to provide disinterested cover-age of public affairs for sensationalism in the pursuit of profit. And although heaims his fire at the Herald and Post initially, the Editor makes clear in the next issuethat all newspapers are implicated when he describes, with some Miltonic reson-ance, a ‘Convention of Editors’.

11 The Morning Herald was founded in 1780 by Henry Bate Dudley, who had Whiggishtendencies. The Morning Post had been around since 1772 and took the Ministerial line.

12 See Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic,2006), 179–209.




OnMonday evening last all the Editors of the morning papers attended, as usual, at thetheatre upon duty. The sound presently echo’d from box to box—‘Have you seen theDevil?—what a damn’d fellow it is—he has cut us to pieces.’ At last they grew sovociferous, that fearing to disturb that part of the audience who pay their money, andalso that they should expose themselves . . . they agreed to put on manly resolution, andmeet at Jupp’s together. (1:26)

After these digs at the newspapers for their slavish concern for money, cabal-likesecrecy, and even for their seating (identifying them as sitting in the boxes ratherthan the pit suggests they have abandoned the intellectual classes for socialstanding), the Editor describes their meeting: ‘[B]ustling Billy’ (possibly WilliamJackson, until recently editor of the Morning Post) opens a discussion whichfeatures comments and suggestions ranging from outright hostility to apathyby Henry Sampson Woodfall (Public Advertiser), Henry Bate (Morning Herald),‘Mr. Gazetteer’ (James Perry), ‘Mr Ledger’ (possibly Leonard MacNally), and anunidentified Irishman (possibly Dennis O’Bryen, Leonard MacNally, or WilliamSampson). The following issue sees the group publish ‘Resolutions of theScrambling Newspaper Party’, which sets out a strategy of ignoring The Devilin their publications while funding campaigns to identify the Editor and using‘three-penny halfpenny men’ to discredit him in coffeehouses (1:42). The Editorrevels in his success and continues to lambast them for scandalmongering, parti-sanship, sensationalism, inaccurate reporting, and plagiarism, the chief chargesthat run through the issues of The Devil. His is a noble task: ‘to interrupt theirunworthy career is all I expect—to distinguish the liberty from the licentiousnessof the press—to separate the gold from the dross—to shew the difference betwixtfirmness and abuse—betwixt satire and scurrility—and I shall find them, let themtry to evade me how they will’ (1:45).

THE DEVIL IN PUBLIC DEBATE

At this point, we should note that Dibdin can be aligned with a broad critique ofnewspapers that took place in the 1780s, the second of two decades of whatWerkmeister termed the ‘age of the scandal sheet’.13 As Barker has documented,there were a number of portentously monikered newspaper correspondents in the1780s, such as ‘Alfred’ and ‘Frankly’, who lamented the licentiousness of the Britishpress—so Dibdin is in no way as maverick as he portrays himself to be.14 Theproliferation of new press titles during the decade provoked much jostling and,consequentially, a deeper level of scrutiny of their motives and editorial positions, afact acknowledged by the newspapers themselves. The General Advertiser andMorning Intelligencer printed an ‘Estimate of the Merits and Demerits of theNewspapers printed in London’ where it marked nineteen different newspapersout of twenty in a host of categories that included Intelligence, Truth, Independence,

13 Werkmeister, Daily Press, 4. 14 Barker, Newspapers, 12–13.




Servility, Wit, Slander, Insidiousness, and Absurdity.15 Newspapers also featuredin political caricatures of the period, highlighting their capacity to inflame andparticipate in political discourse.16 Hence Dibdin is one of an array of commentatorsfrom the period engaged in holding the expanding newspaper industry to account byscrutinizing its activities and motives with forensic attention.The distinctive value of Dibdin’s contribution to these debates is that The Devil

offers detailed material on the characters of the men who ran the press in the1780s: the descriptions of their exchanges give us a sense of their personalities andhow they interacted with each other, or at least the public perception of same. ‘TheRev. Mr. Herald’ (Henry Bate Dudley), for instance, emerges in Dibdin’s pages asthe dominant personality of the newspapermen (1:29). Moreover, Dibdin is verycareful to support his journalistic critique with data, often at considerable length.Often his criticisms, particularly to do with plagiarism and inaccuracy, are sup-ported by the documentation of particular cases on a paragraph-by-paragraphlevel. Those criticisms with regard to the alleged positive reception of a play by aLondon audience are contrasted to his own, more desultory, experience of attend-ing the play.17In the 1780s increasing coverage of theatrical events facilitated the growth of the

newspaper industry. However, argues The Devil, this was to the detriment of bothindustries:

For the stage also you must be an adept in puffing; for if you cannot demonstratethat languor is delicacy—rant, fire-stalking, grace—coldness, judgment—noise,feeling—affectation, ease—grimace, wit—buffoonery, humour—or, distortion thevis comica, you know not theatrically how to praise the acting of the day. If you cannotprove, that bombast is the true sublime—ribaldry, genuine comedy—plagiary,originality—or, a pun, the ne plus ultra of wit, you must not attempt to speak ofperformances. And, if you have not the knack adroitly to represent, that a thinaudience is an overflowing one—that silence, dissatisfaction, disgust, contempt,nods, shrugs, and shakes of the head, are bursts of applause—roars of laughter,universal approbation! transport! delight!—for, I believe, the theatres have now gonethrough every expression of satisfaction in the language but extacy [sic] and rapture—you are not fit to describe the reception every performance is sure to meet with in thedramatic advertisements on the day following its first representation; though three-fourths of the audience had, the evening before, gone away perfectly of [sic] opinionthat it had been completely damn’d. (1:7)

Again, there is a long tradition of writers lamenting the degeneration of the theatres,particularly on the grounds of spectacle, from Thomas Rymer through Addison

15 General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer (9 January 1782).16 See, for example, ‘The Whig Club, or the State of the Blue and Buff Council’ (1784), ‘The

Political Sampson in Revenge Sets Fire to the Country’ (1784), and ‘A Barber[’]s Shop’ (1785) in MaryDorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 11 vols (London: Trustees of the BritishMuseum, 1938), 6:150, 178, 269.

17 See, inter alia, the review of Leonard MacNally’s Richard Coeur de Lion in the fourth issue(1:54–64). The Editor works his way through a number of reviews from the newspapers, beforeoffering his own detailed critique over the course of no fewer than ten pages.




and Goldsmith to Sheridan.18 What Dibdin does distinctively and successfullyis to expose the corrupt commercial symbiosis of newspapers and dramas. Byscrutinizing dramatic performances that he has attended and then highlightingthe discrepancies between his experience and those reports from the critics, he givesunparalleled and uncomfortable clarity to the overlap between the two spheres ofinfluence.19 The Editor supplements his exposure of the unhealthy relationshipbetween newspapers and theatres by turning his attention to the greed and venalityof theatre managers: ‘Timoty [sic] Toby Tickle’ proposes a ‘Plan for constructingDramatic Pieces upon Mechanical Principles’ which will get ‘rid of the expence,trouble, and impertinence of poets and musicians, amounting to a considerableannual saving of mortification and money’ (1:86). Again, this draws on theSpectator, whose Essay 31 poked fun at a dramatic ‘projector’ who aspired tosolve the supposed conundrum of having to travel around London to sampledifferent types of theatrical entertainments: ‘In order to remedy this great Incon-venience, our Projector drew out of his Pocket the Scheme of an Opera, Entitled,The Expedition of Alexander the Great; in which he had disposed all the remarkableShows about Town, among the Scenes and Decorations of his Piece.’20 The Deviloffers a more acerbic take on dramatic miscegenation: it also pokes fun at thestrange mélanges offered on London stages and, like the Spectator, is distraught atthe dominance of Italian opera in London.21 Moreover, the satire further docu-ments a number of systemic ‘back-of-house’ changes which have taken place inLondon theatres to its detriment: the managers taking a bigger slice of revenues,author benefit nights being offered under worse conditions, a decreasing pool ofacting talent, and worsening employment conditions for actors. All of this occurswhile the population of London and its theatre audiences have increased signifi-cantly: the suggestion is that managers have been wringing their hands publiclywhile siphoning off profits for themselves, uncaring as to the quality of the dramaticfare they are serving up, and having little concern for their employees. Tickle offersmock sympathy to the managers and suggests getting rid of authors altogether:

But if you discard authors, how are you to get performances? to which I answer,—thatwith much labour and pains upon the very principle, that your pieces have been knitand spun for several years back, have I constructed a kind of dramatic loom, fromwhich you shall get performances of all dimensions, materials and qualities;—I’ll weavetragedies for you, with situations that have escaped the discernment of that satiric lynx,Mr. Sheridan:—as to comedies, you may pick and chuse;—I’ll manufacture farces that

18 See David O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre (London: Pickering & Chatto,2010), 87–9.

19 The plays which come up for particular examination include: MacNally, Richard Coeur de Lion(CG, October 1786); John Burgoyne, Richard Coeur de Lion (DL, 24 October 1786); Frederick Pilon,He Would Be a Soldier (CG, 18 November 1786); Hannah Cowley, The School for Greybeards (DL,25 November 1786); Thomas Arne’s popular opera Artaxerxes (CG, 13 January 1787); and ElizabethInchbald, Such Things Are (CG, 10 February 1787).

20 Spectator 31 in Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler andThe Spectator (Boston: Bedford, 1998), 352.

21 Compare Spectator 18 to The Devil, 1:106–8.




you may sketch to operas, and operas that you may shrink to farces.—But a goodhome-spun spectacle is your object, the materials from abroad; there you may excitecuriosity, and defy criticism; for who are ill-natured enough to abuse the peacock’s legswhile they look at his feathers? (1:89–90)

The Editor draws attention to the commodification of theatrical entertainment andthe critical timidity of current commentators. Tickle’s suggestion even echoesSwift’s Modest Proposal at the close, telling managers that they may ‘chop, change,adopt, dispose, extend, compress, snip, hack, hew, strain, distort, mangle, manacle,fritter, or dissect [his proposal] how, and in what manner you please’ (1:91).The allusion to A Modest Proposal and its withering attack on colonial exploit-

ation fits into a pattern. Literary echoes play an important part in The Devil, withDibdin clearly drawing on particular authors readers would associate with enlight-ened critiques of unchecked commercial rapacity, critiques that were consistentwith his unease with the commercial intimacy between newspapers and theatres.Over the course of four issues, Dibdin publishes a parody of Goldsmith’s TheDeserted Village (1770), titled ‘Innovation’, with a hilarious mock dedication toJohn Burgoyne, previously a British general in the American War of Independence,who had not covered himself in glory.22 Goldsmith’s poem was one of the bestknown and most powerful attacks on Whiggish ideas of commercially-enabledimprovement, luxury, and exploitation of the lower orders, making it ideally suitedto Dibdin’s critique of both internal and external theatrical matters:

Joy-giving playhouse! best delight in townThy merit’s fled, and any stuff goes down.’Midst thy bays the pruning knife is seen,And critic fury tears away the green;Monopoly now grasps the whole domain,And Authors, Actors starve, nor dare complain. (1:141)

Swift is also echoed more directly over a series of eight issues in Volume Two. ‘TheWorld in a Nutshell: or Circumnavigation’s Non Ultra’ documents the ‘Voyagesand Adventures of SIMON SINGREEN’ beginning with his trip to the ‘Antipodesof England,—being an Island in the South Seas’ (2:28–9). Shipwrecked on thisisland, Simon’s experiences reveal the deficiencies of British life right from the offwhen he is revived by a cup of smuggled tea, a dig at the perceived failure ofWilliam Pitt’s attempts to curb such activity.23 Singreen continues jubilantly tocelebrate the superiority of England to its Antipodean reflection by documentingthe corruption of its politicians, its bloated legal world, the artifice and vacuity of itswomen, the prostitution and crime in its capital, the credulity of its people, the

22 ‘Sir, I can have no expectations in an address of this kind, either to add to your reputation, orestablish my own; you can gain nothing from my admiration, as I am ignorant of that art in which youare said to excel* . . . ’ The deadpan footnote reads ‘*losing an army’. The dedication is signed ‘I am, Sir,with great admiration of your firmness in the time of captivity, be it or your person, or your reason,Your most obedient.’ ‘Innovation’ is published in 1:9, 11, and 13, and 2:2.

23 Pitt’s ODNB entry claims, however, that his anti-smuggling measures were largely successful.




corruption of its press, theatre, and parliament (which the ‘ups’ and the ‘downs’contest). Finally, we should note the inclusion of a play, presumably authored byDibdin, but which the Editor cheekily suggests may be a translation from Voltaire(1:149). French Faith; or, the Virtuous Individual is an attack on the commercialtreaty that Pitt had drawn up with France. The play’s depiction of the bloody eventsof St Bartholomew’s Day 1572 is meant as a warning against the double-dealingFrench and a reminder of intense religious and cultural differences.24 Commerce isimagined here as misguidedly aligning two implacably unsuited opposed parties,and Pitt’s commercial treaty comes under sustained attack in the pages of The Devil.Yet for all the Editor’s pretensions of being motivated by disinterested patriotic

intentions, it is evident that Dibdin is also moved by personal vindictiveness.A difficult character, he had plentiful cause to direct his vitriol against newspapers(which had ignored his contribution to the Stratford Jubilee, for one thing) and thetheatres. To offer one specific example, he used the weekly publication to attackRichard Daly, the Dublin theatre manager with whom he had fallen out. TheEditor publishes a letter from ‘Little Ireland’, who warns of the perfidious Daly andgives a blow-by-blow account of the falling out with Dibdin which is, ratherunsurprisingly, entirely sympathetic to Dibdin. The Editor adds a note to theend of the letter disingenuously declaring that if Dibdin wants to respond, he willinclude the letter—if he receives it early enough (2:103–5). The letter follows indue course, and this device allows Dibdin to paint himself in a glowing and noblelight under his own name after maligning Daly’s character through the ‘LittleIreland’ soubriquet (2:136–40).

THE DEVIL IN CONTEXT

A tremendous amount of creative energy was expended on the twenty-two issues ofThe Devil, but how might we assess its impact on the London public and itsinstitutions? The difficulty is that much of the evidence that we have is internal. Inother words, we are largely reliant on the periodical itself and Dibdin’s reflectionson it to answer this question. In The Professional Life, Dibdin claims that theperiodical sold 4,000 copies of its first issue in one day, but there is no way to verifythis figure. Barker offers a selection of sales figures for daily newspapers of 3–5,000at this time, but warns that these figures should be treated with caution as it is in thenewspapers’ respective interests to exaggerate sales figures to advertisers.25 Weshould also note that the price of The Devil increases from two pence, to two anda half, to three pence over the course of its life, which may indicate that falling

24 The supposed play also features in a contemporary caricature The Treaty of Commerce or NewCoalition (Samuel W. Fores, 26 February 1787), which shows a duplicitous Louis XVI with the playpartially hidden under his foot while negotiating with George III. Fores, of course, also publishedThe Devil.

25 Barker,Newspapers, 23. Readership would have greatly exceeded sales, although it is very difficultto be precise as to what the appropriate multiplier should be as estimates varied wildly. See JeremyBlack, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987), 105.




demand required the price to rise to cover increased unit production costs. On theother hand, the Editor claims that the first price increase (which coincided with thethird issue) was driven by ‘encouragement’ from ‘a large and respectable body ofsubscribers’ (1:43). We can add that when the tenth issue was published, anadvertisement stated ‘Number I and Number III being now wanted to make upregular Sets, Notice is given, that a new Impression of them will be ready theBeginning of this Week’, further suggesting buoyant sales.26 The Freemason’stavern hosted a ‘Gentleman’ presenting an ‘Attic Entertainment of Readings andImitations’ which included extracts from Shakespeare, Sterne, and The Devil. Astickets were on sale for 2s. 6d., this suggests that Dibdin’s periodical had achieved acertain status among his target audience of gentlemen.27 After The Devil publisheda less than complimentary review of Hannah Cowley’s The School for Greybeards(4 December 1786), the General Advertiser (5 December 1786) immediately leaptto her defence against this ‘unmanly attack’.28 Nevertheless, the same newspaperfor 8 December 1786 announced a series of changes had been made to the play,suggesting that The Devil ’s opinion had weight. Additional evidence that Dibdinhad made something of a public splash is contained in the third issue, where theEditor revels in his anonymity in the wake of much public effort being spent ontrying to uncover his identity:

[T]he pleasantest consequence of these various surmises is, that it has been attributedto twenty different authors, not one of whom has the slightest qualification for so boldan attempt. Among these are, three lords, a duke, two bishops, and a judge. Some havesaid the Jesuitical Edmund begins to waver, and tempted by the Devil, keeps himself inequipoise, like a stationary balloon, to catch an Eastern gale. We have a long letter, toprove it is written by some ‘Devil of a Dennis’; but I would have its author to know,‘We speak to no scavengers.’Mr. Tickel is also said to have a hand in it; for who but theauthor of Anticipation could write the Dreamer? . . .Nor is there a word of truth in thereport industriously circulated, that Mr. Sheridan, by way of giving the Duenna a lifton its revival, wrote our critique on that piece. (1:39)

The balance of evidence—circumstantial as it may be—does suggest that The Devilmade an impact on the public consciousness of the mid-1780s. It was certainly intune with contemporary criticisms regarding the licentiousness of the press. Whatthe periodical offers scholars today is a colourful take on the interactions ofsignificant journalistic figures from the period. It also gives granular detail on thecommercial interdependence of the newspapers and theatres, a facet of newspapereconomics for which scholars have not sufficiently accounted. But it also gives awonderfully vivid example of Dibdin’s literary range, and we might conclude by

26 St James’s Chronicle (7 December 1786).27 The ‘Gentleman’ in question may be the literary editor George Stevens (1736–1800). The

advertisement in the Morning Herald (7 November 1786) states that the performer assisted SamuelJohnson with his edition of Shakespeare.

28 In a blow for female equality the Editor had asked, ‘As to this comedy then, I ask any man ofreason and understanding, whether there ever appeared on any theatre, a more indecent abortion, andif that should be allowed, whether its being written by a lady, is not the very reason why it ought to beconsidered as an object of public reprehension’ (1:160). See also 1:174–5, 192.




asking why Dibdin devoted so much energy to the satirical miscellany at this pointin his career. Certainly, there would have been generic appeal to him: a satiricalmiscellany which allowed him to adopt a variety of different voices and presentideological positions in a humorous and knowing fashion would certainly havesuited a theatrical temperament that would go on to manage the Sans Souci. Whatthe periodical also offered Dibdin was a chance to settle scores while also delineat-ing a sober critique of the part that commerce and its subordinates, greed and self-interest, had played in the corruption of the ideals of the Spectator.In Essay 69 of Addison and Steele’s journal, Mr Spectator describes the Royal

Exchange as a forum for cosmopolitan and enlightened exchange, a space wherethe world comes together for mutual gain and advantage. ‘It gives me a secretSatisfaction’, he writes, ‘to see so rich an Assembly of Country-men and Foreign-ers consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making thisMetropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’.29 Such activity, its whirl ofmovement and progress, is celebrated by a publication which sees itself as avehicle for societal improvement: ‘Among those Advantages which the Publickmay reap from this Paper, it is not the least, that it draws Men[’]s Minds off fromthe Bitterness of Party, and furnishes them with Subjects of Discourses that maybe treated without Warmth and Passion.’30 The Spectator, a wartime publication,posited a post-conflict new global economy, lubricated by enlightened trade. Butby the 1780s, Britain had been involved in a number of further significantconflicts and the ambition of the Spectator was proved groundless, in Dibdin’sview. Trade and commerce were at the top of the political agenda in relation toAmerica, France, Ireland, and India during the disputatious 1770s and 1780s.Commercial treaties and agreements were the stuff of discord and enmity, hencethe day of the disinterested spectator would never dawn, not least while individ-uals sought to exploit and augment public-sphere dissonance for the gain ofprofit. The Devil, then, might be thought of as an impassioned verdict thatthe aspirations of a Whiggish commercial Enlightenment had definitively failed.Dibdin’s attacks on individuals such as Dalymight well have been personal, but thesewere subsumed to his broader concern for the degeneration of the public sphereand the crass symbiosis of what should have been two proud bastions of Britishliberty, the theatre and newspapers. Dibdin’s later periodical, The By-stander; or,Universal Weekly Expositor (August 1789 to February 1790) further supports thisclaim.

CODA: THE BY-STANDER

Dibdin ceased publication of The Devil in February 1787. It is uncertain whatcaused him to stop, although the penultimate issue mutters darkly about ‘manyattempts to injure [The Devil]’ (2:292). His Life suggests, as we have seen, thatthere was a ‘confederacy’ aligned against him which brought out a rival publication

29 Mackie, Commerce of Everyday Life, 203. 30 Ibid., 99.




and were not averse to playing dirty in order to quash The Devil. Eventually,Dibdin writes, he simply grew tired. This is certainly plausible, as there were anynumber of people who might have had it in for this periodical, not least theproprietors of The World, Edward Topham and John Bell. The World first appearedto the London public in January 1787 at the same time as the second volume of TheDevil. Dibdin seems to have had a particular dislike for this paper, which received afarrago of abuse such as ‘The Poor World struggles hard,—its nonsensical inco-herence is like the delirium of a man in an incurable fever, whose ravings are moreviolent and less collected in proportion, as the moment of his dissolution’ (2:66). Itis at least possible that Topham and Bell might have taken steps in response. Yetthere is a more prosaic explanation: he simply decided to abandon the publicationas he was embarking on a countrywide tour in March 1787 in anticipation ofemigrating to India.Dibdin, as we know, never went to India, and he ended up back in London. The

ODNB notes that 1789 was the year that he composed many of his most popularand patriotic songs, such as ‘Tom Bowling’ and ‘Poor Jack’. It was also the year thathe returned to periodical publication with The By-stander. The withdrawal—partially at least—suggested by the title is notable, and a more direct evocation ofthe aspirations of the Spectator. Certainly, there had been a moderation of tone andcontent: for instance, there is much space given over to historical surveys of Frenchand Italian theatre (and less jingoistic vitriol) and there is dedicated space givento ‘The Essayist’, a literary persona who writes on topics of abstract general interestsuch as ‘desire, hope, and possession’ (325), ‘the art of pleasing’ (393), and‘composition in writing’ (358). It would be untrue to say, however, that therewas a complete rupture with The Devil—Dibdin refers disparagingly again to thecommercial treaty of the 1780s (141) and pointedly lauds the Drapier’s Letters in apaean to Swift (161), for example. He offers an excoriating broadside against TheWorld, a paper he truly seems to dislike, of which this is only a snippet: ‘Indeed alow paper it ever was. Is not every thing that is worthless, senseless, pitiful,incongruous, indecent—low? Is not every thing that imposes on mankind, thataffronts our understanding—low? Are not arrogance, foppery, and folly low?’ (317).Yet the reader of The Devil and The By-stander will find that Dibdin’s tone hasmellowed in the latter publication in sympathy with the more passive title.Dibdin was writing in the midst of the French Revolution, and a desire to tonedown the more antagonistic aspect of his writing would be in keeping with agrowing moderation in many Britons. Doubtless, as David Kennerley shows inChapter Five of this volume, in The By-Stander Dibdin continued to keep bothbarrels trained on Britain’s institutional failings; however, this later periodical is alsocareful not only to cut down but also to shore up existing institutions and to setthem against the iniquity of French alternatives, a trope pervasive in the decade. Inthe first issue of The By-stander, he draws attention to France where the ‘worstanarchy and the most barbarous cruelty has so recently reigned’ (9) before closingwith an ode ‘written to commemorate the Birth-Day of his Royal Highness thePrince of Wales’ of almost 300 lines (14–16). The major difference between thetwo periodicals is one of tone; Dibdin, perhaps recognizing a need for restraint,




reins himself in at a time of national crisis. His critiques of commerce, self-interest,and venality remain, but with the nation under threat, he offers some balance. Theemergence of a more moderate tone in tandem with the writing of his morepatriotic and successful songs seems consistent, although a hint of the Devilwould always remain in Dibdin.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the European Commission’s Marie Curieprogramme, which facilitated the research and writing of this chapter.



Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 0003304481 Date:9/10/17Time:18:40:31 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003304481.3DDictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 78

5Loyalism, Celebrity, and the Politics

of PersonalityDibdin in the 1790s

David Kennerley

On 12 May 1792 William Locke, the printer and publisher of The Observer, foundhimself before the Court of King’s Bench on a charge of publishing a ‘libellousparagraph reflecting upon the character of Mr. Charles Dibdin’.1 The paragraph inquestion implied that the playwright Isaac Bickerstaff was the real author of thesongs Dibdin was currently performing to great acclaim at the Sans Souci theatreand, in a series of innuendos, insinuated that their relationship may have consistedof more than just plagiarism:

The reports circulated of Mr. BICKERSTAFF’s death, we are extremely happy to contra-dict; the more so, as it might probably deprive the public of Mr. DIBDIN’s exertions toamuse them. Men of fine feelings, are not apt to forget their dearest friends.

Poor DIBDIN, with all his genius and talents, cannot succeed, although, it is said, heis backed by some persons of fame and Notoriety.

BICKERSTAFF is lately arrived from Italy—he was last night behind the scenes at hisold friend DIBDIN’s Sans Souci.2

These allusions stemmed from the fact that Bickerstaff and Dibdin had formerlybeen close associates in a highly successful theatrical partnership, producing operassuch as The Padlock in 1768. However, their joint endeavours had come to anabrupt end in 1772 when Bickerstaff fled the country following accusations ofsodomy.3Locke’s trial eventually concluded in a conviction in February 1793, but,

knowing that Locke was only the publisher and not the author of the paragraph,Dibdin struck a deal to mitigate the sentence Locke would receive on condition hewould stand as a witness against the author, Isaac Swan, in a subsequent prosecu-tion.4 Swan, a lawyer and hack writer for The Observer and The World newspapers,had continued during Locke’s trial to taunt Dibdin through a series of paragraphsrepeating and embellishing upon the same themes—revenge, perhaps, for Dibdin’s

1 The Diary; or Woodfall’s Register (14 May 1792). 2 The Observer (18 March 1792).3 Tasch, The Dramatic Cobbler, Chapter Twelve. 4 Life, 3:222–4.



own journalistic assault on The World a few years earlier, as detailed in Chapter Fourof this volume.5 Having secured Locke’s promised testimony, Dibdin launched asecond, and this time civil, suit against Swan in the Court of Common Pleas on 18May 1793, which terminated in victory and an award of £200 damages.6 In asubsequent, more embarrassing episode, he again went after Swan and the printerof The World, Robert Bostock, for another paragraph, still asserting plagiarismfrom Bickerstaff, but also describing Dibdin’s Sans Souci shows as badly performed,poorly attended, and only applauded by paid claqueurs. This suit, heard at the Courtof King’s Bench on 25 June 1793, was found in Dibdin’s favour, but with thehumiliating award of only one shilling in damages, effectively a victory for thedefendants.7Why did Dibdin respond to these press attacks by launching libel trials, espe-

cially given the expense of such proceedings, rather than simply ignoring them?What was he trying to prove or to defend? The answers to these questions lie in theform of solo performance that Dibdin had pursued since 1787, which dependedfor its success on the cultivation of a carefully controlled sense of intimacy with thepersona of the performer. As we shall see, key traits in Dibdin’s public image werehis supposed naturalness, sincerity, independence, and manliness. The intendedeffect of this persona was to underwrite the veracity and honesty of the opinionsand sentiments contained in the songs and anecdotes he performed at the SansSouci, casting Dibdin as a plain speaking, open, independent voice on currentaffairs that his audience could trust. Given the rising political temperatures of1792–3, this performance of personality had a pressing significance, one thatcomplicates the received picture of Dibdin as the tub-thumping loyalist songwriterpar excellence. Certainly his songs espoused loyalist values, sometimes very overtlyand forcefully, but he was also keen to point out the vices of contemporaryauthority figures, targeting ministers, aristocrats, and bishops as hopelessly corrupt,hypocritical, and failing in their duties. His was therefore an ‘independent loyal-ism’, ready to affirm the merits of the British constitution and especially the virtuesof the ordinary soldier and sailor striving to defend it, while also eager to counterany suggestion that expressing such values was simply a servile pandering to thedictates of a corrupt and incompetent Establishment. Appreciating this exposesnumerous resonances between Dibdin’s political language and that of contempor-ary radicals and reformers, since their calls for constitutional reform were frequentlybased on similar claims that they spoke from a position of true independence andcould thus offer a sincere and honest assessment of the political reality to the Britishpublic. These libel trials were consequently far from an insignificant spat. ExploringDibdin’s response to them offers important insights into the influence of celebrityupon late-eighteenth-century performance culture and allows us to uncover morefully the diverse and multivalent strands of loyalism in this most turbulent era ofBritish politics.

5 The World, issues for 13, 15, 20, 22, and 25 October 1792. 6 Diary (20 May 1793).7 Diary (26 June 1793); Morning Chronicle (26 June 1793).

79Loyalism, Celebrity, and the Politics of Personality



THE PERFORMANCE OF PERSONALITY

In recent years, the eighteenth century has increasingly been seen as witnessing thebirth of modern ‘celebrity’, distinguished from earlier types of fame through itsnon-dependence on birth or rank, its use of the new media made available by theemergence of the public sphere, such as newspapers, magazines, and cheap visualprints, and its emphasis upon a sense of intimacy with the private personality of thepublic individual.8 As several scholars have observed, particularly in relation toGeorgian theatrical culture, the obsession with personality and its disseminationthrough a vast range of media marks out this period from its predecessors. Whetherthrough the explosion of theatrical biographies, the subtle language of the theatricalportrait, or even through the collection of porcelain figurines of actors and actresses,the communication of personality and the desire for intimacy were basic anddistinctive elements of Georgian performance culture.9Dibdin’s solo shows carried the influence of celebrity upon theatrical perform-

ance to new heights. As contemporaries attested, the success of these showsdepended upon creating a sense of intimacy between performer and audience.The actor and playwright John O’Keeffe recalled how, at one of Dibdin’s perform-ances in 1792, ‘he ran on sprightly and with nearly a laughing face, like a friendwho enters hastily to impart to you some good news’.10 Similarly, George Hogarth,a juvenile attendee of Dibdin’s performances, drew a distinction between thefriendly, intimate style Dibdin adopted and the more distant feel of a publictheatre: ‘His manner of speaking was easy and colloquial; and his air was morethat of a person entertaining a party of friends in a private drawing-room, than of aperformer exhibiting to a public audience.’11 The Gresham Professor of Music,Edward Taylor, who as a youth in Norwich saw Dibdin perform, concurred that hisperformance ‘was related with great ease and effect: no attempt at oratory ordeclamation, but simply as if he was relating his travels to a party of friends’.12This friendly, informal, intimate style, perfectly suited to the small-scale cosiness ofthe Sans Souci (as shown in Figure 7.1), seemed to engender a feeling of privilegedinsight into private space, both physically and psychologically, as Judith Hawleydescribes in Chapter Six of this volume.

8 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 13–14, 19, 28–9; Leo Braudy, The Frenzy ofRenown: Fame & its history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 361–89; Simon Morgan,‘Celebrity: Academic “Pseudo-Event” or a Useful Concept for Historians?’ Cultural and SocialHistory 8/1 (2011): 95–114.

9 Joseph Roach, ‘Public Intimacy: The Prior History of “It.” ’, in Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody(eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–30;Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003), 9–16; Laura Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image-making (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,2011), 14–20; Heather McPherson, ‘Theatrical Celebrity and the Commodification of the Actor’, inSwindells and Taylor, Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 192–212.

10 John O’Keeffe, Recollections of the Life of John O’Keefe, written by himself, 2 vols (London, 1826),2:322.

11 Hogarth, xx. 12 Taylor, f.8.

David Kennerley80



This sense of a privileged glimpse into Dibdin’s personality as a unique sellingpoint of the Sans Souci performances is reinforced by numerous comments that theanecdotes, lyrics, and music of these performances reflected and revealed the privatefeelings of their author. A correspondent of The Oracle observed of Dibdin’s serioussongs that they ‘do his feelings credit’, while the London Recorder felt his compos-itions reflected ‘the highest honour on Mr. Dibdin’s mind and abilities, as anauthor and a composer’.13 Other critics wrote of Dibdin’s songs as doing ‘equalhonour to the head and heart of their author’ or of ‘words and music [that] possessmind, character, and taste’.14 As Isaac Land observes in Chapter Eleven, such ideaswould later develop into the Victorian moralizing gloss given to Dibdin’s songs andcharacter by admirers such as Hogarth. A few contemporaries found this emphasison the personality of a single individual distasteful—the short-lived satirical paperthe Tomahawk or Censor General branded Dibdin one of the ‘three greatest egotistsof the age’—but most members of Dibdin’s substantial audiences appear to havebeen eager to catch the glimpses of his personality interwoven in the fabric of hisanecdotes and songs.15 In essence, then, Dibdin’s performances traded on thecarefully controlled disclosure of a public persona, perhaps a form of the ‘interiorityeffect’ that Felicity Nussbaum has observed in the performances of contemporaryactresses, and the manufacturing of a sense of physical and psychological intimacyat the Sans Souci.16

PROJECTING A PERSONA

Dibdin’s now irrecoverable performances were his most direct method of creatingthe right impression of his personality in his audiences’ minds, but clear traces ofthis process are captured in his autobiographical and other writings and in theresponses of contemporary audience members. He places great emphasis, forinstance, upon ‘nature’, ‘sincerity’, and cognate terms in describing himself andhis work. ‘In my songs’, he writes, ‘I have gone for truth, for nature, for simplicity,for strength, for sentiment and for character.’17 In writing a ballad, Dibdinobserves, ‘the mind shuns every thing affected and fantastic, and seeks an asylumin the bosom of nature’, while he laments that ‘every attempt to establish simplicityand nature has been considered [by the public] as paucity and imbecility’.18 As wellas emphasizing his own straightforward sincerity, he condemns those unwilling tostate their opinions openly and honestly. In his chapter on ‘Anonymous Letters’ inhis Observations on a Tour, Dibdin writes of the ‘palpable and malignant deception’

13 The Oracle and Public Advertiser (13 October 1794); The London Recorder, and Sunday Gazette(22 March 1795).

14 ‘Lyceum’, The General Magazine and Impartial Review (December 1789): 562; ‘Mr. Dibdin’sWags and Oddities’, The General Magazine and Impartial Review (February 1791): 86.

15 The Tomahawk, or Censor General (21 January 1796).16 Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century British

Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 20.17 Life, 1:xxiii. 18 Ibid., 3:41–2.




practised by those who wrote such anonymous criticism. ‘Truth loves the light,’ hedeclares, ‘it never skulks; it scorns to lurk in whispers and inuendoes [sic]; it ishonest and open. It does not insinuate; it proclaims.’19 In defending his totalrejection of all the ‘advice’ contained in these letters, Dibdin asserts defiantly that‘nature has permitted me to be exactly what I am and neither more nor less’.20Furthermore, such personal qualities were an explicit subject of his performances;an advertisement for his entertainment for the 1793–4 season, Castles in the Air,declared the anecdotes and songs would discuss topics such as ‘Simplicity’, ‘Truth’,and ‘Candour’.21 Nor need we take Dibdin’s word alone: one contemporaryjournalist commended Dibdin’s performances by observing that ‘the light andsuperficial, may applaud the trick of art—but a manly and well-ordered taste, willever prefer the touch of nature’.22 Similarly, Taylor later reflected that the things thatmost distinguished Dibdin from his many imitators were ‘those genuine touches ofnature and unaffected feeling which appeared to flow from him without effort’.23Alongside the natural and sincere, Dibdin constantly, almost obsessively,

declared his sense of ‘independence’, which was inextricably tied, as for many menin this era, to his sense of his masculinity. Linda Zionkowski, citing the examples ofSavage, Pope, and Johnson, has noted that celebrated authors often found themselvesin a predicament regarding their relationship with the public: although largelydependent upon them, to acknowledge this fact threatened the independent mascu-line identity deemed essential to successful authorship.24 Dibdin seems to haveadopted a similar position, writing, ‘[W]hen I speak of the public, I shall certainlynot condescend to use any of the fawning, cringing terms that are in general made useof upon these occasions. They are degrading to the man, and insulting to hisprotectors.’25 Although he admits ‘I get my bread by the public’, he nonethelessinsists, ‘I will not be a servant to any one. I am no minion, no dependant [sic].’26Most notably of all, yet rather duplicitously, Dibdin emphasized his manly

independence by rejecting ‘puffing’. ‘I never wrote nor connived at a single puffin my life,’ he declares, though he quickly adds ‘if exaggeration be meant by theterm puffing’.27 Elsewhere, he elaborates on this belief: ‘I had always determined tostand or fall by my own fair pretensions. In all that I ever directly, or indirectly,suggested to the public, I demanded fair justice, and sought candid investigation;and, above all other revolting ideas, I disdained the vice of puffing.’28 As he implies,the puff threatened not only a performer’s independence, but also his sincerity andcandour with the public. Of course, there is plenty of evidence to suggest thatDibdin cultivated alliances with important press figures, such as WilliamWoodfall,

19 Observations, 2:157. 20 Ibid., 2:158.21 Morning Post (7 November 1793).22 [Original emphasis], ‘Sans Souci’, The General Magazine and Impartial Review (November

1791): 582.23 Taylor, f. 2.24 Linda Zionkowski, ‘Celebrity violence in the careers of Savage, Pope and Johnson’, in TomMole

(ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009), 168–85.

25 Life, 2:91. 26 Ibid., 4:9–10. 27 Ibid., 1:6. 28 Ibid., 3:219.

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and that these brought him a string of immensely favourable reviews and plugsfor his song publications.29 Nevertheless, even if Dibdin was as mired in theswamp of press manipulation as any of his theatrical contemporaries, it remainedabsolutely vital to him to prove to the public his ‘independency of mind’, which,as he declares at the close of his Professional Life, he had ‘made it my pride andhappiness to adopt’.30It was to defend his reputation for naturalness, sincerity, independence, and

manliness that Dibdin went to court in 1792–3. His openness, honesty, andindependence as a creative artist were a callous deception if his songs were thelabours of another passed off as his own. Dibdin’s motives during the trials are mostclearly displayed in the letters he wrote to the press during these months and theremarkable ‘Preface’ to the second volume of his Collection of Songs, published in1792, in which he took the opportunity to explain his conduct.31 Contrasting hisown sincerity with the public with the duplicity of his enemies, he argues that inseeking to destroy his reputation, they ‘knew they could not do so honestly, andtherefore they attempted it by villainy’.32 Through their accusations, Dibdincomplains, they sought to depict him as ‘a man void of faith or honour’ and ‘animpostor’, thereby encouraging the public ‘not only to damn my works, but mycharacter’.33 He refutes the accusation of plagiarism by pointing out how differentboth his works and his character were from those of Bickerstaff. In the process, heassociates Bickerstaff with the antithesis of all the character traits of sincerity andindependence that Dibdin so greatly prized. ‘Am I enamoured of that insincerityfor which he was remarkable and notorious?’ Dibdin asks his readers, or ‘for thatprofligacy and immorality which characterised his opinions?’34 ‘Have I not uni-formly rejected all assistance,’ he continues, ‘nay the assistance of much better poetsthan he—and did not he court assistance from any body who would lend it him?Were not the suggestions of GOLDSMITH, KELLY, GARRICK, nay even SHUTER, andmany others, caught at by him with avidity?’35 Far from Dibdin being theplagiarizer, it is Bickerstaff whose life and work are a fraud upon the public.Furthermore, as Dibdin liked to insist, this press slander had been caused by his

own determined, independent stance. It was his refusal to give ‘the editors ofnewspapers, or their understrappers, general tickets’ that produced these ‘con-temptible paragraphs’.36 In this opinion he was vehemently reinforced by WilliamWoodfall in The Diary, who asserted ‘Mr. Dibdin has boldly broken through thepaltry practice of sending free-admission tickets to every petty scribbler in anewspaper; and to this circumstance we may fairly ascribe all the scurrility of oneor two of our daily prints.’37 This was also the main argument given in court;Dibdin’s lawyer at the trial of Swan and Bostock argued that ‘no other reason

29 Morning Chronicle (14 January 1789);Morning Herald (17 January 1789); The World (9, 16, and21 May 1789, 15 November 1790); Diary (26 and 29 March 1791).

30 Life, 4:328.31 Dibdin’s letters to Diary (23 March and 18 October 1792); Charles Dibdin, ‘Preface’ to

A Collection of Songs, Selected from the Works of Mr Dibdin, 2 vols (London, 1792), 2:v–xv.32 Dibdin, ‘Preface’, 2:vi. 33 Ibid., 2:vii. 34 Ibid., 2:xii.35 Ibid., 2:x–xi. 36 Dibdin’s letter to Diary (18 October 1792). 37 Ibid.




could be assigned for this conduct than that he [Swan] had been refused a freeadmission-ticket to the Sans Souci’.38 As both a refutation of plagiarism and of thepractice of giving free tickets to ensure favourable reviews, the trials were a forcefulattempt by Dibdin to assert his independence and honesty to the public.Yet, at the same time, they also underlined his very dependence upon the public

for support, since by suing for damages Dibdin was forced to demonstrate thatthe harm caused by such paragraphs to his reputation had led to loss of incomefrom the public. His indictment of Swan states that the paragraphs had conveyed‘insinuations injurious to the fair fame and character of the Plaintiff, by endeav-ouring to ruin him in the opinion of the Public on which he altogether relied, forpresent subsistence and future fortune’. On this basis, Dibdin requested £2,000damages (in the end, he was awarded a still generous sum of £200).39 This, plus thefact that witnesses at the trials had an unfortunate habit of revealing that he hadretained the practice of giving free tickets to some favoured journalists, whileselectively refusing others,40 meant that Dibdin felt compelled to issue a series ofpublic pronouncements explaining that he was not suing out of narrow, commer-cial self-interest, but rather as a principled defender of the public’s honour.‘Though I hold it arrogant and reprehensible lightly to obtrude private grievanceson the public,’ he wrote in a public letter to The Diary, ‘yet I could have no sense ofthe benevolence that supports and protects me, if I did not with manliness anddetermination resist an insult in this instance offered more to them than to me.’41He could quite happily have ignored the ‘noisome stuff ’, he claimed disingenu-ously in the ‘Preface’ to his song collection, ‘but it has annoyed the public, andtherefore it is my duty to put on the extinguisher’.42 Dibdin thus acknowledged hisclose and intimate relationship with the public, but recast his role from that ofdependant to that of defender of the public’s honour. Both Dibdin’s determinationto go to the expense of prosecution and the rhetorical spin that he put upon hismotives for doing so demonstrate the importance to him of maintaining hisreputation for sincerity, honesty, independence, and manliness before the public.They are a telling sign of the importance of persona, of celebrity, to Dibdin’s soloshows, perhaps to a greater extent than any other contemporary performer, giventhe intimacy and individuality upon which his performances were based. Moreover,appreciating the performance of personality in which Dibdin engaged also holdsthe key to understanding the political resonances surrounding these trials and thewider brand of loyalist politics that Dibdin espoused.

THE POLITICS OF PERSONALITY

In the febrile political climate of 1792–3 areas once considered far from politics,such as private life and personal character, were acquiring increasing significance inpublic debate. As John Barrell has noted, the Royal Proclamation against Seditious

38 Diary (26 June 1793). 39 Diary (20 May 1793). 40 Diary (26 June 1793).41 Diary (18 October 1792). 42 Dibdin, ‘Preface’, 2:v.

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Writings in May 1792 and later the Two Acts of 1795 led to a ‘sense thateverything had suddenly been or could suddenly become politicized . . .Activitiesand spaces which had previously been thought to be private, in the sense not justthat they were “outside” politics but were, by general agreement, positively insu-lated from it, suddenly no longer enjoyed that protection.’43 Adopting a broaderperspective, Matthew McCormack has observed the increasing emphasis placed inthe second half of the eighteenth century upon an understanding of politics, andespecially the contrast of loyalty and disloyalty, as intrinsically tied to emotionalexpression and states of feeling.44 In this environment, Dibdin’s particular brand ofloyalism, advocated most especially through his songs at the Sans Souci, wasunderwritten by the supposed naturalness, sincerity, independence, and manlinessof the performer. If this persona could be shown to be false, then the loyalistsentiments Dibdin advocated might equally become insincere, unnatural, servile, oreffeminate. More was at stake, therefore, in Dibdin’s defence of his reputation thansimply his own commercial interests.To appreciate this, we need to pin down the precise nature of Dibdin’s loyalism.

As Isaac Land explores in Chapter Eleven of this volume, a Victorian caricature ofDibdin’s politics, based on a nostalgic reading by conservative moralists of only asmall part of Dibdin’s oeuvre, primarily the sea songs, has proved widely influentialin cementing the impression among subsequent scholars that Dibdin was a highlyeffective part of the government’s propaganda machine. He has even been brandedby some as ‘the real laureate of the Great Terror’, supposedly orchestrated by Pitt’sgovernment in these years.45 Recently, however, a more rounded picture ofDibdin’s politics has begun to emerge, which has suggested a much more equivocalstance towards the government and its policies.46 This has underlined not only theneed to examine the full range of Dibdin’s works, but also to recognize these worksnot simply as texts, but as performances, in which the personality of the performerand the interrelationship between the songs and anecdotes in an evening’s per-formance all had a role to play in shaping a rather different brand of loyalistsentiment. So far, this new research has largely focused on the period after 1803,when Dibdin was directly employed by the government to write ‘war songs’. As weshall see, this ambivalence and his resistance to toeing the government line werealready important themes of Dibdin’s politics during the 1790s and earlier.On the face of it, Dibdin’s songs are avowedly loyalist in their sentiments.

Indeed, Dibdin boasted that his songs were so persuasive regarding the duties of

43 John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2006), 4.

44 Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking “Loyalty” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies 35/3 (2012): 407–21, esp. 416–19.

45 Originally coined by H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley, Napoleon and the Invasion ofEngland: The Story of the Great Terror, 2 vols (London: John Lane, 1908), 2:293, this epithet hasrecently been repeated by Mark Rawlinson, ‘Invasion! Coleridge, the defence of Britain and thecultivation of the public’s fear’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict,1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 124, while a similar interpretation is offered by Ian Dyck,William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 88.

46 Cox Jensen, Napoleon, 19, 56–9.




servicemen and loyal subjects that they could instantly quell mutinies upon beingsung to the troops.47 Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that Dibdin intensifiedhis overtly loyalist writing during 1792–3. In one of the anecdotes from TheQuizzes; or, a Trip to Elysium, the solo show that he performed during that autumnand winter, he used a characteristic nautical metaphor to argue that the ship of statecannot sail upon the principle of absolute equality. As a sailor explains, equality is ‘athing you see that canot [sic] easily be—Englishmen are equally brave, equallyhonest, and equally loyal but as for the rest the boatswain to the rigging and thepurser to the slops . . .whether the vessel be a ship or a kingdom—She canot expectto make a prosperous voyage—unless all the crew keep their proper station.’48In his songs from these months too, the same sentiments can be traced. ‘The

Compact of Freedom’, which he first performed in late November 1792, directlyadvocates loyalty, which Dibdin portrays as the foundation of British liberties:

Rejoice ye Britons!—Freedom’s sons rejoice!Laud in your grateful lays a patriot king:—Fir’d with one soul, one sentiment, one voice,To ratify the glorious compact, sing,So may we taste the sweets of Liberty;As we are loyal, so may we be free.49

To emphasize and facilitate the song’s association with the patriotic defence of thenation, the published score features accompaniments for a military band of clari-nets, horns, and bassoons. Appearing amidst the fervour of the loyalist reaction,spearheaded by the foundation of John Reeves’s Association for the Preservation ofLiberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers in November 1792, thesong was praised by The Diary as a ‘timely sacrifice to loyalty’, while a later issue feltit to be akin to an ‘oath of allegiance’ embodying the sentiment that ‘Britons arefree only in proportion as they are loyal’.50 Another song, ‘Ninety Three’, writtento mark the start of the new year, was similarly lauded in the press for its loyalsentiments.51 It is striking for being one of the few songs in Dibdin’s corpus thatdirectly attacks the principles of the French Revolution:

Some praise a new freedom, imported from France,Is liberty taught them like teaching to dance?They teach freedom to Britons! our own right divine!A Rush-light might as well teach the sun how to shine.In famed ninety threeWe’ll convince them we’re freeFree from every licentiousness faction can bringFree with heart and with voice to sing God save the King.52

47 Life, 1:8.48 BL, Add. MS 30962, C. Dibdin Table Entertainments, vol. 3, f. 95v. For another example,

see ibid., f. 9.49 Charles Dibdin, ‘The Compact of Freedom’ (London, [1793?]).50 Diary (3 and 10 December 1792). 51 Diary (3 January 1793).52 Charles Dibdin, ‘Ninety Three’ (London, [1793?]).

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Most striking is the fact that, amid a background of rising political tensions andimpending war with France, reviewers were eager to interpret the success of thesesongs as signs that the sentiments contained within them naturally coincided withthe feelings of Dibdin’s audiences. The audience, recorded one paragraph in theMorning Chronicle, ‘always require a repetition of the song [“The Compact ofFreedom”], [so] that sentiments, so congenial to their feelings, should be the moreforcibly impressed on their minds’.53 The Diary, meanwhile, reflected that ‘in thepresent moment every touch at the times becomes in some degree interesting; andthe operation of a mere song on the feelings of a mixed and causual [sic] audience,may form a tolerably true test of their real sentiments’. The writer then goes on tonote that ‘Ninety Three’ had been encored (almost twice) and called for again at theend of the evening.54This desire to record the visible effects of such patriotic songs upon the feelings

of audiences attests to an anxious impulse to associate such sentiments with thenatural and sincere feelings of the British people. However, the fact that it was theWhig reformist Morning Chronicle, rather than any pro-ministerial print, thatproved the most vocal admirer of a song such as ‘The Compact of Freedom’ shouldalert us to the fact that Dibdin’s patriotism could be read in far from straightfor-wardly ‘loyalist’ ways. Indeed, while he was keen to exploit the loyalist mood forcommercial gain, for Dibdin this did not entail a servile kowtowing to thegovernment. His language of loyalty was continually underpinned by assertionsof independence—of independent judgement and feelings leading naturally toloyalist sympathies—rather than simply following what the government instructedpeople to think. As Mark Philp and others have shown, he was not alone inadopting such a position, but he presented an especially forceful articulation ofthis way of thinking.55This ‘independent loyalism’ is most noticeable in his strongly critical stance towards

those in authority, frequently accusing them of corruption and hypocrisy. Much ofthis material can be traced back to his earlier journalistic work in publications such asThe Devil (1786–7) or The By-Stander (1789–90). Both periodicals took a very dimview of politicians; in Chapter Four of this volume David O’Shaughnessy discussesThe Devil’s criticism of William Pitt and especially the Commercial Treaty withFrance (1786), but politicians of all stripes were subjected to withering criticism.56Moreover, alongside this irreverence towards politicians, these periodicals attackedother familiar targets: the aristocracy and the Church. The By-Stander contains anessay calling for aristocratic titles to be based on personal merit rather than inheritedprivilege. It concludes, ‘Since then high birth imposes an obligation to possessgreat merit, it ought rather to inspire diffidence and modesty, than haughtinessand pride. Thus to many has nature been very cruel; for not contented with refusing

53 Morning Chronicle (10 December 1792). 54 Diary (3 January 1793).55 Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, English Historical Review 110 (1995): 42–69, and

Donald E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist Association Movement of 1792–3 and British Public Opinion’,Historical Journal 9/2 (1966): 179–90.

56 Devil, 1:93; 2:148–52, 194–200; By-Stander, 2, 10–11, 31–2, 141.




them every kind of merit, she has taken care they should be well born.’57 Meanwhile,the periodical played with particular relish upon another stock trope in a poeticaccount of the behaviour of a greedy prelate who invites a poor curate to a trulygargantuan dinner:

As he [the bishop] sipt, and turn’d over each morsel he eat [sic]Of the jellies, and trifles, and ices, and whips,Which seem’d pleas’d to salute his right rev’rend lips,Scarcely deigning to cast on the curate his eyes,He belch’d out—‘here mister—nay friend do not rise,I was going—Jack give me some wine—do you see,To ask of what value your living may be?’

The curate, who sat all the time and admir’dAnd eat from this feast just what nature requir’d,Full of innocence, answer’d him pat at a word—‘Just as much as your bishopric, rev’rend my lord:If the measure we hold of our consciences even,Both rewards will be great—for our treasure’s in heaven.’58

One satire in particular brought many of these themes together into a far-reachingcondemnation of Britain’s contemporary ruling elite. The second volume of TheDevil contains a serialized account of a circumnavigator’s ‘Trip to the Antipodes ofEngland’, the conceit of which is that Antipodean society is the inverse of that ofEngland. In the Antipodes, all is corrupt and dissolute, whereas England, the narratorcontinually reminds the reader, is a paragon of moral perfection. Antipodean bishops,for instance, are portrayed as grasping after ‘plurality of benefices’, while theirministers of state show a total disregard for the ‘public good’. ‘But is it so in England?’Dibdin’s narrator asks:

Oh no—the bishop there lolls in no unfeeling splendour, deaf to the petitions ofmiserable curates and large families . . .Nor is the Antipodean statesman less a foil tothe English one, who—GLORIOUS CHARACTER—has the good of his country constantlyat heart—who never makes a promise but he keeps, never betrays the public for hisprivate views, never encourages the flattery of sycophants, never abuses his master’sconfidences, never merits the execration of the people; . . . he makes no blunders, leviesno unreasonable or oppressive taxes, frames no unwholesome laws, nor does any onething either partial, rigorous, puerile, ineffectual, ungenerous or unjust.59

Crucially, these themes of gluttonous bishops, corrupt politicians, and oppressivetaxes were not confined to Dibdin’s journalism of the late 1780s, but remained avibrant and much discussed theme of his solo shows throughout the crisis years ofthe 1790s. ‘The Trip to the Antipodes’ story from The Devil, for instance, wasreworked as the basis of Dibdin’s show for the 1794–5 season, Great News; or aTrip to the Antipodes. One reviewer in The Oracle observed that the show relayedthe ‘great news . . . that, at the Antipodes, people practise every vice and folly; and,in England, every thing sensible and good’. ‘The irony generated by this idea’, the

57 By-Stander, 135, 137. 58 Ibid., 128. 59 Devil, 2:73–5.

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journalist remarked, ‘is pleasingly new, and had a most pleasant effect,’ while thesongs were ‘more pointed and marking than any Mr. DIBDIN had before pro-duced’.60 This reviewer’s comments may refer more to the social satire contained inthese songs, since (at least in the versions subsequently published by Dibdin) theirlyrics are not obviously political. Instead, it would seem that Dibdin’s politicalsatire was mostly confined to the anecdotes that threaded the songs together.A close comparison of the satire quoted above from The Devil with the (unfortu-nately fragmentary) manuscript documents in the British Library which appear tobe Dibdin’s performance notes reveals a close resemblance of theme and politicalresonances.61 This contrast between anodyne songs and politically biting anecdotesis no contradiction, but rather a careful strategy; the anecdote, in comparison tothe printed text of a song lyric, was safely evanescent and thus the ideal mediumin which to convey material that might irritate the authorities. The momentof performance therefore permitted a wider range of political stances to be adoptedthan published texts of those performances imply.The political uses of the anecdote can be seen in another example from the

previous season’s show, Castles in the Air, in which Dibdin used an impersonationof the innocence and simplicity of a country bumpkin to offer a comic satire ofauthority figures in rural society. Asked what he had seen on a trip to the capital(in which he appears to have visited the exotic animals kept at the Tower ofLondon), the rustic replies:

Why nought but what I had zeed before. I sawed the wild beasts; there were a bear thatI wish I may die if I did not take for our parson; and, as to the monkies, I a zeed a wholeposse of sutch as they go to dinner at the Squires. The man shewed me a Hyena, I thinktwas, and he twold me that he seizes upon people and so moans over em, as if he weresorry to eat them up. I said that were nothing at all; for that, about our village, wehad the same sort . . . but we call em lawyers and excisemen; that seizes upon peopletoo, but, so far from making bones about the matter, they eats them up without beingsorry at all.62

Such complaints about greed and corruption in high places and of the harsh burdensof heavy taxation, far from casting Dibdin as the ‘real laureate of the Great Terror’,instead bring himmuch closer in sympathywith the work ofmore radical songwriterssuch as John Freeth, a member of a Jacobin club that met at his public house inBirmingham, who likewise highlighted government corruption and the miseries ofheavy taxation in his highly popular political songs.63 Dibdin and Freeth also shareda patriotic identification with ordinary soldiers and sailors, praising their heroismin service to the nation.64 Yet there were important differences too. Dibdin neverstrayed anywhere near the radicalism of Freeth’s song ‘Blood Royal’:

60 Oracle (13 October 1794).61 BL Add. MS 30960, C. Dibdin Table Entertainments, vol. 1, f. 142v.62 Ibid., ff. 45–46.63 John Horden, John Freeth (1731–1808): Political ballad-writer and innkeeper (Oxford: Leopard’s

Head Press, 1993), 8–9, 14, 24–5.64 See, for example, ibid., 150–1 (‘British Volunteers’), 161–2 (‘Britain’s Glory’), 200 (‘The Tars of

Old England’).




The blood which some boast of, from this or that quarter,A Knight of the Thistle, or Knight of the Garter,Was ne’er any better, or is at time present,Than what freely flows in the veins of a PEASANT;’Twixt that of a MONARCH and that of a BEGGAR,When shed to distinguish a DOCTOR ’twould stagger.65

Rather, the collective effect of Dibdin’s work is to suggest that the British consti-tution and social order remain the best guarantors of liberty and happiness, but thatthose in power are too often guilty of failing to live up to the high standardsrequired to maintain the nation’s dignity and strength. Such indictments areperhaps at their most damning in his numerous sea songs that draw contrastsbetween hard-working, honest Jack Tars, and aristocratic officers more concernedwith making a dashing fashion statement in their military regalia than withdefending the nation.66This interpretation sets Dibdin’s government pension, which might otherwise

reinforce the idea of Dibdin as a key part of the ministerial propaganda machine, ina new light. The details of this £200 pension, awarded in June 1803, remainunclear, and our only substantial source is a self-justificatory pamphlet, publishedby Dibdin in 1807, in protest at its revocation by Lord Grenville’s ‘Ministry of allthe Talents’.67 While he makes little secret of his willingness to accept a pension,Dibdin’s portrayal of his motives for doing so suggests this was hardly born out of adesire to serve the government’s interests. In the first place, as he repeatedlyobserves, he was simply being pragmatic; now in his late fifties, and with retirementincreasingly desirable, such a pension would secure a comfortable old age.68Furthermore, he clearly implies that being known to be in the pay of the govern-ment could only harm his future commercial prospects. Even before receiving thepension, he was already suffering, he claims, from a reputation for being ‘outra-geously loyal’. ‘People were tired with what they called being schooled by me’, hewrote, ‘when they ought to be considered as competent to judge for themselves.’69Evidently, Dibdin was well aware that to divert from the ‘independent’ style ofloyalism through more outright support for a particular ministry was to risk publicdispleasure. In addition, rumours that he was a government agent had previouslydone severe damage to his commercial success in the more disaffected parts of theprovinces and, unsurprisingly, in post-Rebellion Ireland.70 Of course, he had astrong interest in portraying himself as having suffered in the loyalist cause, but hisdemand for a regular annuity was in part, as he suggested, to offset the losses heanticipated making on the British War Songs series that the government desired himto write, since he feared they would be ‘scouted’ by the public.71 In confirmation of

65 Ibid., 179.66 For examples, see D. A. B. Ronald, Youth, Heroism and War Propaganda: Britain and the Young

Maritime Hero, 1745–1820 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 126–7.67 Charles Dibdin, The Public Undeceived, written by Mr Dibdin; and containing a statement of all

the material facts relative to his pension (London, [1807]).68 Ibid., 11–12, 25. 69 Ibid., 16. 70 Ibid., 12–13, 18. 71 Ibid., 21.

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this prophecy, his entertainment, Britons Strike Home, based on these ‘war songs’,ran at a ‘very heavy loss’.72 His awareness that obviously propagandistic works didnot sell well is also apparent in the songs themselves, which, as Oskar Cox Jensennotes, display a remarkable reluctance to engage in the kind of savage Francophobiaand demonization of Napoleon common in the more straightforward loyalistpropaganda songs of the era.73Above all, Dibdin sought to persuade the public that he was entitled to a

pension, not because of his pandering to the whims of a particular minister, butas a reward for loyal service to the nation and to the public. To make this point,he cites testimonials from members of the public, such as a group of gentlemen ofYarmouth, who had written to him stating their belief he should be rewarded insome way.74 He compares his situation to that of Greenwich and Chelseapensioners, or to literary figures such as Dr Johnson, who were rewarded witha comfortable retirement for their duty to the national interest.75 In particular, heinsists he is no sinecure-hunter, comparing his deserving situation to that of thecronyism that, he implies, had surrounded Grenville’s ministry. Indeed, he hintsthat it was the number of ‘candidates for private favour’ clamouring at theTreasury door during Grenville’s time in office that had forced the governmentto cancel Dibdin’s reward for his public services.76 At times, he even adopts thelanguage of reform, declaring ‘the burdens of the people call loudly and imperi-ously for every exercise of economy’ and ‘the most diligent care ought to be takenthat the public money is not lavished away’ on individuals who did not trulymerit such reward.77While much of this may well be a desperate attempt to save a public reputation

in tatters by a performer now forced by the cancellation of his pension to returnfrom retirement to the stage, it is nonetheless significant that he chose to do so byinsisting he was the same, independent-minded loyalist in 1807 as he had beenback at the height of his success in 1792–3. Far from indicating his closeness to thegovernment, this episode reveals on the one hand an unsurprising, self-interestedpragmatism with an eye towards retirement, and on the other a firm and continuingbelief that writing straightforward ministerial propaganda could only lead tocommercial failure.

72 Ibid., 25.73 Cox Jensen, Napoleon, 57–9. Another possible example of Dibdin’s propagandistic work from

this period is a fragmentary manuscript held in the Theater Collection at the Houghton Library,University of Harvard (MS Thr 198.55), which appears to be a rough draft of a pamphlet or publicaddress Dibdin was preparing during his years as a government pensioner. Although fairlyincoherent, it exhorts British subjects to show loyalty to their king, know their place, and performtheir duty, while roundly condemning all schemes for reform of the constitution. Nonetheless, it tooavoids any Francophobia or demonization of Napoleon, preferring instead to focus on British ‘virtue’and the blessings of British laws, which, Dibdin reminds his audience (and indeed any potentiallyover-mighty government ministers), were ‘formed for the security of us all nor can any be above orbelow them’ (f. 2).

74 Dibdin, Public Undeceived, 14–16. 75 Ibid., 33–4, 50–2.76 Ibid., 50. 77 Ibid., 6.




INDEPENDENT LOYALISM

Recognizing this persistent ‘independent’ strain to Dibdin’s loyalism furthers ourunderstanding of the complexities of political culture in the 1790s in importantways. Through his performance of personality, he was competing with radicals andreformers, who also liked to claim their cause was supported by their openness,sincerity, and independence, in the face of government duplicity and repression.Jon Mee has observed that radicals focused intensely on the issue of sincerity andopenness in their conversation as a defiant response to government attempts topolice private speech through the Gagging Acts.78 Yet the natural sincerity of thepersona Dibdin projected in his performances suggests attempts from a loyalistperspective to claim and contest the politics of openness and genuine feeling.Equally, Matthew McCormack has portrayed radicals and reformers as the mostvocal proponents of ‘manly independence’ in the first half of the 1790s, offering itas a sign of the integrity and virtue of their political critique. Meanwhile, he argues,loyalists were unable to do anything more compelling than reiterate the merits ofdependency and hierarchy, as epitomized by Hannah More’s Village Politics.79Dibdin’s brand of loyalty, however, was inseparable from his public persona ofmanly independence. In contrast to the passive obedience encouraged by manyloyalist propagandists, Dibdin offered a means for individuals to affirm their loyaltyto the constitution and social order while refusing to surrender their right tocriticize those charged with the administration of it. If the popularity of hisentertainments and the wide circulation of his songs is anything to go by, it wasa recipe that proved highly successful with the public.It was this that made Dibdin’s defence of his personality through the libel trials

all the more pressing. Accusations of plagiarism undermined Dibdin’s claim that hissongs were the outpourings of natural feeling and independent loyalist sympathies.Instead, they became an open deception, their ability to persuade the public of thevirtue of the loyalist cause undermined by their revelation as the work of a knownsodomite. Indeed, the insinuations of sodomy slung at Dibdin also containedpolitical overtones. Dibdin was not the only actor in this period to have beenaccused of improper relations ‘behind the curtain’, the very same phrase alsoappearing in William Jackson’s poem, Sodom and Onan, which accused SamuelFoote of committing the same offence.80 As Matthew Kinservik and others haveshown, in Foote’s case and in other high profile accusations in this period, sodomywas particularly associated with corruption and cover-ups in high society andgovernment.81 Hence the charge levelled by Swan at Dibdin, that he was ‘backedby some persons of fame and Notoriety’, may well have had a particular resonance.

78 Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter Three.

79 Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in GeorgianEngland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 2, 120–47.

80 William Jackson, Sodom and Onan, a satire (London, 1776), 7.81 Matthew J. Kinservik, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Sodomy in the Age of George III’, British

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29/2 (2006): 219–36; Charles Upchurch, ‘Politics and the

David Kennerley92



As his entanglements in the politics of personality show, interpreting Dibdin andthe contemporary political culture he inhabited cannot be done through a purelytextual analysis. Instead, we must appreciate the nature of his works as perform-ances in which the person speaking, the manner of delivery, and the juxtapositionof texts as part of an evening’s bill of fare mattered as much as the words spoken.This approach uncovers more fully the nature of Dibdin’s ‘independent loyalism’and its part in the complex interweaving and contesting of political languages ofsincerity and independence, loyalism and reform. In doing so, it highlights thepublic’s antipathy towards overt government propaganda. For Dibdin’s audiences,loyalty to King and Constitution had to be carefully packaged alongside clearcriticism of the government and the ruling elite if it was to be persuasive, com-mercially successful, and popular. His stance makes the so-called ‘loyalist reaction’after 1792 seem a lot less sure-footed, dominant, and pro-ministerial than somehistorians have suggested.82 Instead, the appeal of Dibdin’s performance of loyal-ism appears contingent upon fragile, and thus carefully defended, claims to speakindependently, critically, and honestly to the public. With its cutting edge of socialand political satire, and its sense of discontent and distrust of authority, Dibdin’sloyalism was far removed from the aims of other prominent loyalist organizers andwriters.83 As such, it lends further weight to the arguments of Philp and othersabout the profound diversity of uses for the language of loyalty in the 1790s.84 Inshort, while Dibdin’s mastery of the politics of personality and the appeal of hisbrand of critical ‘independent loyalism’ made the job of those seeking to winsupport for more radical measures of reform more difficult, it was far from easylistening for anxious ministers and their allies struggling to keep the public onsidein a tumultuous decade of war and revolution.

reporting of sex between men in the 1820s’, in Brian Lewis (ed.), British Queer History: New Approachesand Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 17–38; A. N. Gilbert, ‘SexualDeviance and Disaster during the Napoleonic Wars’, Albion 9/2 (1977): 98–113.

82 See H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford:Blackwell, 1985), Chapter Two; Frank O’Gorman, ‘Pitt and the “Tory” Reaction to the FrenchRevolution 1789–1815’ in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 21–37; Ian R. Christie, ‘Conservatism and stability in British society’in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 169–87.

83 For comparison with other contemporary forms of conservative opinion, see Kevin Gilmartin,‘In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s’,Journal of British Studies 41/3 (2002): 291–328; Jennifer Mori, ‘Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism,Nationhood and the State in the 1790s’, English Historical Review 118 (2003): 33–58; MichaelS. Smith, ‘Anti-Radicalism and Popular Politics in an Age of Revolution’, Parliamentary History24 (2005): 71–92.

84 See Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism’; Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain, Chapter Three; DavidEastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’ in Mark Philp (ed.), The FrenchRevolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146–68;Nicholas Rogers, ‘Burning Tom Paine: Loyalism and Counter-Revolution in Britain, 1792–1793’,Histoire Sociale/Social History 32 (1999): 139–71.




6Dibdin and the Dilettantes

Judith Hawley

In 1791, despite revolutions in France and Haiti, the publication of revolutionarytexts by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the breaking out of the‘Priestley riots’ against Dissenters in Birmingham, the London newspapers were fullof references to sites where care did not reign or riot. On Wednesday 22 June, theStar reported on the ‘HON. MRS. HOBART’S RURUAL [sic] BREAKFAST ’,which was held the previous Saturday at Sans Souci. The World on 27 Septembernoted, ‘SANS SOUCI, et sans six sous, is the old French description of a mancareless and happy.’ On 6 October, the World reported on the movements of thePrince Stadtholder and his Consort, recording that she was expected to reach NewSans Souci shortly. Two days later, theMorning Post and Daily Advertiser advertisedthat on 31 October, ‘an entirely new, and perfectly original Entertainment’ called‘PRIVATE THEATRICALS; Or, NATURE IN NUBIBUS’ would be performedat the Sans Souci. These carefree venues were quite different, but all derived fromthe Schloß Sanssouci, Potsdam, summer palace of Frederick the Great. The NewSans Souci is the grander palace built next to it by his successors, who felt hischarming single-storey villa was not majestic enough for them. The first-mentionedSans Souci, venue of the French pic nic, was a grand villa in Ham near Richmond,home to the Hon. Albinia Hobart, later Countess of Buckinghamshire. The last ofthese sites was Charles Dibdin’s brand new venue: a theatre with reception roomsin the Strand opposite Beaufort Buildings, where he performed his one-manentertainments. The name was appropriate, as Dibdin might have felt that hehad cast off all cares when he finally set himself up as Charles the Great: actor,manager, owner, composer, performer—in fact, factotum in his own premises.1While the rural breakfast Mrs Hobart provided for the bon ton in her Richmond

Sans Souci was rather different from the entertainment laid on for the paying public

1 Dibdin was earlier associated with the name and with Frederick the Great when he set to musicfor David Garrick ‘Le Philosophe Sans Souci’, a poem by Rev. Percy Stockdale, in 1773. SeeFahrner, 207n. The shared name may be responsible for the British Museum’s misidentification ofthe print of the interior of Dibdin’s second Sans Souci theatre as ‘Interior of a palace’. Oskar CoxJensen has corrected this error (accessed 13 May 2015): http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3161174&partId=1&searchText=sans-souci&images=true&page=1. Dibdin does not seem to have been entirely confident about the projectand had written up above the stage ‘LET US ALL BE UNHAPPY TOGETHER’—a line from hissong ‘Sound Argument’.



in Dibdin’s rooms in the Strand, the two hosts were united by an interest in privatetheatricals. Dibdin chose this title for the first ever entertainment staged at hisnew theatre because, as he said, ‘private theatricals were the rage’.2 By the lateeighteenth century, amateurs of all classes were staging theatrical performances ina variety of venues and the trend continued well into the nineteenth century.Albinia, ‘Lady Bucks.’, was a stalwart of the late-eighteenth-century am-dramscene, appearing in the Duke of Richmond’s theatricals in his house in Whitehallin 1787–8, in Elizabeth, Lady Craven’s theatricals in Newbury Town Hall in1780, and in 1793 and 1795 at the private theatre Craven built at BrandenburghHouse, Hammersmith after she became Margravine of Ansbach.3 When she wascruelly lampooned in verse and cartoon in 1795, she broke with the Margraveand was later a prime mover in setting up the Pic Nic Society, which stagedentertainments at the New Rooms in Tottenham Street in 1802–3.4 In differentways, Dibdin and the dilettantes were participating in a revolution in theatricalentertainment that would, over the course of the next half-century, overthrow themonopoly of the patent theatres.5Plenty of other things were ‘the rage’ in 1791, so why did Dibdin gamble on

private theatricals in particular as a way of attracting an audience to his experimentalventure? And how did he represent them in his one-man show? This chapter willanswer those questions and provide a context for Dibdin’s show by exploring thecraze for private theatricals. It will also attempt to reconstruct the show by examininga previously neglected autograph manuscript. While private theatricals were in somerespects a pretext to launch Dibdin’s eclectic programme of comic anecdotes, songs,and impersonations (for more on which, see Chapters Seven and Eight in thisvolume), the subject also provided an opportunity for him to reflect on class, gender,nation, and performance in the context of the aesthetically and socially mixedeconomy of the London theatre world at the turn of the nineteenth century.

2 BL Add. MSS 30961, f. 9r. This MS is unnoticed by Fahrner in his account of Dibdin’s career. Allquotations from this manuscript are © The British Library Board.

3 For the Margravine, see Judith Hawley, ‘Elizabeth and Keppel Craven and The Domestic Dramaof Mother–Son Relations’, in Elaine McGirr and Laura Engell (eds), Stage Mothers: Women, Work andthe Theatre 1660–1830 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 199–216.

4 For an overview, see Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatricals in England andWales, 1700–1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978); for more recent studies thatchallenge some of her findings, see Judith Hawley and Mary Isbell (eds), Amateur Theatre Studies, aspecial issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 38/2 (2011). See also Gillian Russell, ‘PrivateTheatricals’, in Moody and O’Quinn, Companion to British Theatre, 191–203. For the Pic Nic Society,see Richard L. Lorenzen, The History of the Prince of Wales Theatre, 1771–1903 (Hatfield: University ofHertfordshire Press, 2014), 13–20. James Gillray commemorates Mrs Hobart’s appearance as Cowslipin Lady Craven’s Brandenburgh House theatricals in ‘Enter Cowslip with a Bowl of Cream’ (1795).He frequently satirized her extravagant entertainments and her rotund figure. She appears in his seriesof caricatures of the Pic Nic Society: ‘The Pic-Nic Orchestra’ (1802); ‘Blowing Up the Pic-Nics;—or—Harlequin Quixotte attacking the Puppets’ (1802) and ‘Dilettanti Theatricals;—or—APeep at the Green Room’ (1803). She also appears in his satires on gambling ladies mentioned in Note17 below. Her husband George Hobart also had an interest in the theatre: he managed the opera at theKing’s Theatre, Haymarket, and their daughter Albinia married the son of George Cumberland,playwright. See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Hobart, George, third earl of Buckinghamshire (1731–1804)’,ODNB (accessed 13 May 2015), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13390.

5 On this long battle, see Moody, Illegitimate Theatre.




THE CRAZE FOR PRIVATE THEATRICALS

The most notorious eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century private theatricalswere those staged by social elites in their grand country houses and Londonmansions. Several aristocrats, including the Duke of Richmond, the Earl ofBarrymore, Sir Francis Drake Delaval, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough,and the Margravine of Ansbach, each put on a magnificent show. Some of thempoured their money into buildings that rivalled the London theatres. Indeed, thetheatre of Richard, Earl of Barrymore at Wargrave, Berkshire, was modelled on theKing’s Theatre, Haymarket. He, like other amateur impresarios, employed Londoncraftsmen as well as actors, dancers, and musicians. The results were impressive:when the bankrupt Barrymore’s theatre was broken up and the materials wereauctioned off, professional theatres snapped them up.6 Private theatricals imitatedthe patent theatres in other ways: they staged full bills of entertainment andcirculated printed playbills and tickets. In other respects, they went beyond theprovisions of the London theatres, providing suppers and balls; they were socialevents as well as dramatic entertainments. The very name of the Pic Nic Societyindicates how important feasting was to their entertainment (pic nicmeant what wemight now call a pot-luck supper to which everyone has to contribute a dish, ratherthan an al fresco meal). On 3 April 1793, after the grand opening of her new theatreat Brandenburgh House attended by the Prince of Wales, the Margravine ofAnsbach threw a masquerade ball and even provided costumes for all one hundredand twenty guests. As well as a theatrical performance, this exercise in conspicuousconsumption performed the function of managing social power. The Margravineemployed her theatricals to re-establish her position after her notorious infidelity toher first husband, the Earl of Craven, had diminished her social credit. Theatricalswere also a continuation of a tradition of country-house entertainments, ostenta-tion, and sociability. When the nobility returned to their estates at the end of theseason, bringing the conventions of the London stage and their enormous spendingpower with them, country-house theatricals also played a role in the integration ofregional and metropolitan culture. In many cases, such as the theatricals atWargrave and Wynnstay, servants and locals were drafted in as performers andaudience. Thus, argues Gillian Russell, gentlemen such as Sir William WatkinsWynn dramatized the ‘dynamics of power between master and servant in theGeorgian household’. Such events, Russell argues, staged ‘not simply a series oflavishly produced plays but theatre’s capacity to mimic and realise the conditions ofthe eighteenth-century social order itself ’.7What was the attraction of these theatricals for the participants? First of all,

precisely that: participation—crossing the line between spectatorship and action.Moreover, women had opportunities to participate in a wider range of capacities on

6 Rosenfeld, Temples, 32–3. Rosenfeld reproduces the bills Edward Hartopp-Wrigley incurred overthe years in constructing and improving his theatre at Little Dalby Hall, 1777–1804 (ibid., 146–53).The private theatres at Blenheim, Woburn Abbey, and Brandenburgh House were also magnificent.

7 Russell, ‘Private Theatricals’, 195, 196.

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the amateur stage. As well as acting and making costumes, they could design décor,write plays, direct rehearsals, and manage the venue. The Margravine of Ansbach isthe prime example of an amateur impresaria, but others, including the DowagerLady Townsend, Mrs Hickford, Mrs Crespigny, Mrs Hobart, the Duchess ofRutland, and Mrs Damer, also played significant managerial roles in privatetheatricals, building on and extending their domestic functions. Men too couldextend their roles: cross-dressing in private theatricals was common, especially inthe armed forces and other single-sex establishments.8 It might have expressed apredilection as well as a necessity.It also exemplifies the boundary-crossing nature of private performance. Where-

as in the professional theatre there are complex cultural, conceptual, and commer-cial distinctions between those on the stage and their paying audience, there ismuch less of a divide between performer and spectator in private theatricals. Theyare usually drawn from the same social—and sometimes even family—group, andtheir familiar roles might bleed through their theatrical ones as in a palimpsest orpentimento.9 Of course, traces of the former roles of professional actors, or details oftheir private lives, may affect the audience’s reception of their current character, butthe effect is likely to be more intense and more part of the pleasure in amateurperformance when the actors are known personally to the audience. Those on bothsides of the curtain might be called on to perform: the Pic Nic Society determined‘to meet once a fortnight, to enjoy the amusements of acting, music, and dancing,and to conclude with a supper, and catches and glees’; the audience, all of whomwere members of the Society, were expected to participate in the singing as well asproviding refreshments.10 Everyone had to bring something to the entertainment.A further attraction was privacy. The upper classes could avoid the exposure to

the masses that they had to suffer in the vast auditoria of the patent theatres. Eventhe private boxes that prompted the OP riots were not private enough for them.11They wanted total control over the tickets. Written into the Rules and Regulationsof the Pic Nic Society was the stipulation that admission was by ticket or invitationcard only, a fixed number of which were issued to each subscribing member: ‘TheLadies Patronesses to have on their List Ten Ladies and Ten Gentlemen; the rest tobe recommended by the Director’, and ‘Members going abroad not to transfer theirtickets’.12 A similar system was in place at the Richmond House Theatricals in

8 See Mary Isbell, ‘The Handwritten Playbill as Cultural Artifact: A French Amateur TheatricalAboard the British Prison Ship, Crown’, Inquire: A Journal of Comparative Literature 1 (2011), (accessed13 May 2015), http://inquire.streetmag.org/articles/40; Mary Isbell, ‘When Ditchers and Jack TarsCollide: Benefit Theatricals at theCalcutta Lyric Theatre during the IndianMutiny of 1857–9’,VictorianLiterature and Culture 42 (2014): 407–23; and Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance:A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 123–51.

9 See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 2001). I am indebted to Mary Isbell for this suggestion.

10 ‘Proposed Rules for the Pic Nic Society’, in The Pic Nic (London, 1803), 1:xxiv. Only onevolume of this projected serial was produced.

11 See David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 13, 227–32; and Marc Baer, Theatre andDisorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

12 The Pic Nic, 1:xxiv.




1787. The Duke was determined to keep the party select ‘by devising an elaboratesystem of invitations to avoid “the intrusion of improper company”’ and by vettingthe guest list the day before the performance.13 Examples of this sort could bemultiplied. Indeed, for some people the main motive for participation in privatetheatricals was to receive tickets for an exclusive event which could then bedistributed as a form of patronage.14Some praised private theatricals, claiming that the intimate setting fostered a

more nuanced acting style than was possible in the patent theatres or attempted inthe minor theatres. However, as Helen Brooks notes, it is impossible to judge thequality of amateur acting at this period, as negative reviews of private theatricalsmight have been motivated by the threat of competition they posed to profes-sionals, while positive ones might have been placed by the performers themselves.15Others argued that it was a rational entertainment, a much better pastime thangambling.16 Not that these were mutually exclusive; both Barrymore and MrsHobart were notorious for both gaming and playing.17 Richard Graves’s thoroughanatomization of the dangers of private theatricals gathers together criticisms fre-quently made of ‘Theatrico-Mania’.18 For one thing, private theatricals were notreally private: ‘too many nobles give their rural retreat some resemblance of a publicplace; and collecting a croud [sic] of half-civilized savages from the surroundingneighbourhood, to see the raree-show and applaud their performances’ (59). Inregarding the lower orders in the rural fringes as racially as well as socially inferior,Graves exemplifies an attitude that Saree Makdisi identifies as characteristic of theRomantic period.19 Makdisi argues that during this period, England did not regarditself as homogenously Western and thus fully superior to the Oriental Other.Dibdin’s impersonations of character types such as the Irishman and Cudjo the

13 Rosenfeld, Temples, 36–7.14 The fencing master, Henry Angelo, claimed that ‘during the time I was one of the dram. pers. at

Brandenburgh-House, my sole motives were to have the means (tickets) to oblige others’. Reminiscencesof Henry Angelo, 2 vols (London, 1828), 2:310.

15 Helen E. M. Brooks, ‘ “One Entire Nation of Actors and Actresses”: Reconsidering theRelationship of Public and Private Theatricals’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 38/2 (2011):3–6. For an assessment of the acting ability of aristocratic amateurs, see Rosenfeld, Temples, 167–9.

16 Angelo uses this term to describe the activities of the Pic Nic Society, perhaps borrowing thephrase from their own publicity (Reminiscences, 1:294–5).

17 On Barrymore, see Rosenfeld, Temples, 16–33; Angelo, Reminiscences; Anthony Pasquin [JohnWilliams], The Life of the Late Earl of Barrymore (London, 1793); John R. Robinson, The Last Earls ofBarrymore, 1769–1824 (London, 1894); Truth Opposed to Fiction, or, An Authentic and ImpartialReview of the Life of the Late Earl of Barrymore by a Personal Observer (London, 1793). OnMrs Hobart’sconviction and fine for running a faro table, see James Gillray, ‘Modern-Hospitality,—or—A FriendlyParty in High Life’ (1792); ‘The Loss of the Faro-Bank; or—The Rook’s Pigeon’d’ (1792); ‘TheExaltation of Faro’s Daughters’ (1796); ‘Discipline a la Kenyon’ (1797).

18 Richard Graves, ‘Theatrico-Mania: An Essay on the Rage for Private Theatrical Exhibitions’, inSenilities; or, Solitary Amusements: In Prose and Verse: With a Cursory Disquisition on the FutureCondition of the Sexes (London, 1801), 57–69. Fuller explorations of the risks they posed topropriety occur in three novels of 1814: Maria Edgeworth, Patronage; Frances Burney, TheWanderer; and Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.

19 Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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Negro as well as his eccentric ‘Oddities’ and ‘Wags’ might constitute in Makdisi’sterms part of the work of making England ‘Western’.Not only were theatricals the source of neighbourhood gossip, but columns

headed ‘Private Theatricals’, ‘Bon Ton’, or ‘Dilettante Theatricals’ appeared innumerous London papers, and items were often picked up by the regional press.The desperation of amateurs to get a mention in the press is satirized in JamesPowell’s Private Theatricals, a two-act farce published in 1791, but not performed.Worrall argues that Powell was a government spy, which might suggest that his playencodes a suspicion of theatricals as socially subversive.20 In the play, Lady Grubb,the theatre-mad wife of Alderman Grubb, instructs the gentleman actor Buskin towrite up the following ‘review’ and send it to the newspapers: ‘The tragedy ofRomeo and Juliet, at the elegant Lady Grubbs[’], last evening, was attended by themost numerous, and brilliant assemblage ever witness’d at a thing of the kind; allthe first nobility throng’d to see it, the confusion to procure seats, it is impossible todescribe, numbers were obliged to return, her theatre being too small to contain soimmence [sic] a crowd.’21 It is highly likely that the dilettantes wrote or commis-sioned such puffs—as did Dibdin himself when he repeatedly trailed the imminentopening of his Sans Souci in the autumn of 1791.22The main threat that Graves warns against is debauchery. Not only do modern

plays not set a good example of morality; the theatre is itself a school for scandal:

As the green-rooms of our public theatres, were never reckoned schools of rigid virtue;so, I am afraid, the private apartments in noblemen’s and gentlemen’s houses, wherethe young people retire to change their dresses and the like, have been productive ofmore intrigue, and elopements, and improper marriages, to the distress of the families,and often, perhaps, the ruin of the thoughtless parties themselves.23

The fear of elopements fictionalized in Austen’s Mansfield Park was instantiated inthe relationship between the Rev. Edward Nares and Lady Charlotte Spencer,daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough, who fell in love while performingtogether at Blenheim Palace in 1789, though they did not marry till 1797.24 TheLord Chief Justice, Lloyd Kenyon, condemned the immoral tendency of theatricalsin 1792, seizing the opportunity of a court case brought by the carpenter ReubenCox against Barrymore for failing to pay him for work on his theatre: ‘His Lordshipdoubted extremely whether they had ever inculcated one single virtuous sentiment.

20 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 274–309.21 James Powell, Private Theatricals, Act 2, Scene 2, in The Narcotic and Private Theatricals. Two

Dramatic Pieces by James Powell of the Custom House (London, [1791]), 25–6.22 The explanation of the term sans souci quoted above comes from one such puff.23 Graves, ‘Theatrico-Mania’, 64–5.24 For a popular account of this affair, see Allan Ledger, A Spencer Love Affair: Eighteenth-Century

Theatricals at Blenheim Palace and Beyond (Gloucester: Fonthill Media, 2014). Other elopementsoriginating in private theatricals include that of Lady Susan Fox-Strangeways and the actor WilliamO’Brien (1764), and Charlotte Wattell, who eloped with Thomas James Twiselton, second son of LordSaye and Sele in 1788. They both ran away to play in the professional theatre. Mrs Twistelton becamea professional actress, but her husband had a change of heart, divorced her, and became parson ofAdelstrop. See Rosenfeld, Temples, 124, 128–32.




He had known instances where they had the contrary effect; and they usuallyvitiated and debauched the morals of both sexes; the performers seldom retiredfrom the entertainment, but every Romeo knew the estimate of his Juliet’s virtue.’25Romeo and Juliet is the play selected for performance by the amorous young amateursVillars and Lucy Grubb in Powell’s Private Theatricals. They use it to dupeAlderman Grubb and his dilettante wife to facilitate their elopement. The Aldermanis less concerned about his daughter’s affair than his wife’s extravagance and preten-tion. His middle-class values, though stereotyped, are represented as superior to theaffectation of those whose heads have been turned by the glamour of performance.Graves also complains that theatricals lead people to forget the parts allotted to

them by ‘the great Master of the drama of life’ (67). This anxiety about role-playing isalso an anxiety about class mobility. Alderman Grubb is furious to learn that hisservants have become uppity and no longer know their place (Act 1, Scene 3). In fact,the craze for amateur performance extended to almost all classes, as it enabled groupsusually caricatured or excluded from the professional stage for a variety of reasons tobecome performers. It was popular among the gentry and themiddling sort, especiallyin family groups such as Henry Fielding’s friends the Harrises in Salisbury, as well asthe Burneys, the Austens, and the LeFanus and the Sheridans in Dublin, who allenjoyed putting on a show at home. Others performed in urban private theatres suchas Mr Fector’s in Dover, Well’s Street in London, and Fishamble Street in Dublin.26Moreover, not only did aristocrats such as Barrymore recruit their estate staff to fill thedramatis personae, but the middle and working classes also organized their own clubsand societies. These ranged from Free-and-Easies and Song-and-Supper Clubs, wheremembers would recite poems and sing songs, to the Spouters who met in taverns andcoffee shops to ‘spout’ or recite speeches from plays.27 In the early nineteenth centurythese clubs evolved into more regular private theatres whose members paid a sub-scription to entitle them to perform; ticket sales were supposed to go to charity. Evenlater, they morphed into the Victorian Music Hall. Amateur dramatics gave people achance not merely to be represented, but to represent.The appeal of theatricals for these classes was in many ways the same as it was for

the aristocracy: conviviality and participation. Moreover, all classes in privatetheatres enjoyed a privilege denied the minor theatres: permission to performspoken drama. The combination of the monopoly of the patent theatres and thecensorship of new plays confined the illegitimate theatres to burlettas and otherkinds of musical entertainment. However, for the lower classes, theatricals also held

25 Quoted in Rosenfeld, Temples, 31.26 See Dobson, Shakespeare, 38–46; Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London:

Hambledon Continuum, 2002), 3–28; Francesca Saggini, Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney andthe Theatre Arts, trans. Laura Kopp (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012),231–2; Anna M. Fitzer, ‘ “Feeling and Sense Beyond All Seeming”: Private Lines, Public Relations andthe Performances of the LeFanu Circle’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 38/2 (2011): 26–37;Brooks, ‘One Entire Nation’.

27 See David Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 42, 133. Worrall treats this subject extensively in this workand also in Theatric Revolution. See also Leslie Ritchie, ‘The Spouters’ Revenge: Apprentice Actors andthe Imitation of London’s Theatrical Celebrities’, The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012): 41–71.

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out the promise of social advancement. Spouters’ Clubs offered opportunities forapprentices to network with tradesmen who might provide employment. It gavethem social skills and experience of public speaking that would also enhance theircareers. Furthermore, for many, amateur theatricals were a stepping-stone to acareer on the professional stage, leading to complaints that they were taking breadout of the mouths of professional actors.28The quality of these performances was also a concern. A review of a performance of

Richard III at Hoxton Town Hall in 1831 spluttered, ‘Mr Green seems to know asmuch about Shakespeare as a monkey knows about philosophy.’29 Such complaintsabout the rights of the lower orders to assert their aesthetic judgement sometimesmasked a fear of social instability or even insubordination. During the Revolutionaryyears, groups meeting in taverns, coffee houses, and so on were always subject tosuspicions of seditious intent. Yet, while the act of putting on a private performancemight challenge authority as represented by the legitimate theatres and local magis-trates, most of the plays performed were not themselves politically radical.30

DIBDIN ’S PRIVATE THEATRICALS

The widespread popularity of private theatricals made them an appropriate choice,then, for the opening night of Dibdin’s first Sans Souci. What, though, was theentertainment like? Did it celebrate or mock private theatricals? If the latter, did itmake the same complaints as other critics? And did it share any features with elite orpopular private theatricals? To answer the first question (what was it like?):Dibdin’s entertainments were made up of a mixture of spoken prose, musicperformed on his specially adapted piano-organ, and songs whose words andmusic he composed himself. There is no printed text of the full entertainment,but there is evidence to piece together: the advertisement for the first performancein the Morning Post (shown in Figure 6.1); the music and lyrics of the songs whichDibdin printed and sold separately from his ‘warehouse’; the recollections of thosewho witnessed his performances; Dibdin’s detailed account of one of his earliestentertainments; and fragments of an autograph manuscript of the entertainment,which seem to be scraps of the text he used in performance and then prepared witha view to publication as a collection.31

28 See Worrall, Politics, 2, 42, 78, 133. 29 Quoted ibid., 133.30 The Morning Post (17 April 1802) professed to find aristocratic amateurs a threat to the natural

order, objecting when Lord Cholmondeley played the flute at a Pic Nic performance that a peer should‘waste the breath that should be used in discussing our laws, to produce sounds from a piece of wood totickle the ears of the tabbies!’

31 Morning Post (8 October 1791); Hogarth; O’Keeffe; Musical Tour; BL Add. MSS 30961, ff.1–13, 40–6, 147. The MS volume is entitled FRAGMENTS of songs, entertainments, etc., with threeleaves of his novel, ‘Hannah Hewitt; or, The Female Crusoe.’ It looks as if Dibdin gathered together MSSthat he had actually used in his entertainments and hoped to publish them under the title The Feast ofReason. He supplied a preface for the collection, but did not succeed in editing them coherently as,although some fragments are cut and pasted (using sealing wax) onto sheets and then edited, there aremany fugitive scraps.




Dibdin’s manner of addressing his audience was distinctive, as was the produc-tion itself: as David Kennerley discusses in Chapter Five of this volume, hecultivated a particularly intimate performative persona. Being a one-man show, itwas unlike most private theatrical performances, which usually imitated the bill ofthe legitimate theatres with a main piece and an afterpiece. The mixture of speech

Figure 6.1. ‘Sans Souci’, Morning Post (8 October 1791). Advertisement. © The BritishLibrary Board.

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and song does, however, resemble the entertainments held in Song-and-Supperclubs as well as the ‘Table Entertainments’ pioneered by George Alexander Stevens.Yet the subject matter is so thoroughly miscellaneous, it is hard to see what directbearing it has on the phenomenon of private theatricals. None of the songs refer totheatricals, whether private or otherwise. Many of them celebrate the big-heartedBritish sailor—the loyalist strain for which he became famous.32 One, ‘Bill Bobstay’,responds to a phrase that Tom Paine had just made notorious: ‘The Rights of Man’.Other songs are less obviously topical or political, but most are sentimental abouthuman variety and convey the message that we should be content with our lot in away that is implicitly conservative.33 The second and third parts of Dibdin’sentertainments had nothing to do with the title. Describing The Whims of aMoment, which he took on tour in 1788, Dibdin writes that after the interval, hewould ‘diversify my entertainment by running still further into eccentricity; adher-ing to no settled plan, but merely taking up detached subjects, ushered in only by afew explanatory words’.34 In other entertainments, Dibdin introduces his ‘Wags’,‘Oddities’, and ‘Quizzes’: clubs of comical fellows including such eccentrics asAdmiral Hawser, the Wild Irishman, a projector, a speculator, the Commodore, adramatic pack, a levee hunter, and Sir Oliver Oddfish.35Dibdin does, nonetheless, begin by directly addressing the subject of private

theatricals. The set-up of the first part of the entertainment is a story about howPhoebus Apollo ‘would often doze out his evenings in spight [sic] of the solici-tations of the muses’ (9r). The Muses have to find a way of keeping him amused,so they call in Momus, the god of satire, to assist them. He advises them to visitthe earth to learn human manners, so that they can devise a private theatrical towake Apollo from his torpor. He boasts, ‘With a little of my assistance I have nodoubt but you will get at men and manners very well; and really I don’t see whyPrivate Theatricals, in Nubibus, should not succeed as well as Private Theatricalsupon earth, where between ourselves they are a little in the clouds too’ (9v).When they return, the Muses each give an account of what they have witnessed.Each anecdote makes a witty or moral point about human manners. Momuscongratulates them and promises that ‘when I shall have touched up in quality ofmanager those hints you have already given and other which you will yet suggest,we shall be able to manage an entertainment worthy the attention of Appollo [sic]’(13r). While they were away, Momus recruited performers: ‘The gods haveconsented to palm themselves upon Appollo as mortals and become the actorsin your farce . . .What signify lord & Lady players?—this is the place for

32 e.g. ‘Tack and Tack’, ‘The Sailor’s Return’, and ‘Jack’s Gratitude, or The Royal Tar’.33 On the subtlety of conservative culture in this period, see Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against

Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007).34 Musical Tour, Letter LXXXVII.35 Charles Mathews developed a similar cast of characters for his monopolylogues. See Edward

Ziter, ‘Charles Mathews, Low Comedian, and the Intersections of Romantic ideology’, in TracyC. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 198–214.




private theatricals, where the Muses ^witty^ Momus manages and the Godsare all strollers’ (13r–v).36Does Dibdin employ this device in order to meditate deeply on the nature of

private theatricals? Or even perhaps to satirize them in the terms we have alreadyencountered? This metatheatrical framework has the potential for producing someinteresting reflections on the phenomenon: Dibdin impersonates gods and musesimitating aristocrats imitating actors performing theatrical roles. We might dwellon the levels of unreality and elevation involved in elite private theatricals andconsider them, in William Empson’s terms, as a version of pastoral in whichmembers of the court imagine themselves as their social inferiors (shepherds/actors)in order to attain a complex state of simplicity and refinement (Arcadian retire-ment/private play).37 Of course, one of the essential differences between privatetheatricals and the public theatre—as between Arcadian and actual shepherds—isthat for the participants in one, it is mere play; for those in the other, it is work.This is not quite the point Dibdin makes when he has Momus opine that ‘neverwere the words of their immortal poet that all the men and women are merelyplayers more truly verified than at this moment’ (9r). Indeed, he stops short ofmounting a direct critique of private theatricals, preferring rather to jab at what heperceives to be derelictions of traditional gender roles.The device does allow him to satirize humanity from the lofty perspective of the

clouds. His chief concern here is gender. He maintains a constant battery againstthe Muses for their supposed feminine weaknesses: their pride (9r), their inabilityto manage without a male (9r, 13r), and their chattering (11r). Equally, however,he attacks transgressions of gender norms. His strongest criticism is reserved forwomen playwrights:

Formerly they spread their bewitching snares to captivate a husband Now they spreadtheir witchery to captivate a thought, Gall, vitriol, copperas and gum mastick make uptheir the ingredients of their inky cauldron . . .But it is not at all wonderful, for, as alady writer the other day abused me, who is remarkable for the chastity of her epithets,this is the age of revolution, and england [sic] like every other part of the world isturning round on its own axle tree. (10r)

Women, he claims, have redirected their sorcery from courtship to histrionicsbecause the Revolution is turning the world upside down.38 If he was thinkingspecifically about private theatricals, the Margravine of Ansbach would be themain target. She had written around eight pieces by 1791 and went on to write oradapt at least a dozen more. But Dibdin makes a similar complaint in Letter 36of his Musical Tour about ‘soi disant FEMALE SHAKESPEARES’ (possibly hehas Hannah Cowley or Elizabeth Inchbald in mind), so it is unlikely that he isthinking specifically about individual female amateurs. Meanwhile, men who

36 In a further draft of this entertainment, the gods descend to earth. Although this version is evenmore fragmentary, it is easier to tell how the anecdotes function as excuses for the introduction of thesongs. (BL Add. MSS 30960, 40r–46v.)

37 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).38 He returns to the theme in the Private Theatricals scrap ff. 42r–43r.

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engage in private theatricals are censured for failing to perform their proper roles:‘Athletic englishmen [sic] that nature intended for soldiers and sailors are nowmen milliners’ (10r). This failure is more critical in these dangerous times as itleaves the country unprepared for war: ‘the whitechappel manufactory has been ata stand some time’ (10r).Social status too is inverted by theatromania. Like Graves and Powell, Dibdin

objects that the lower orders—women especially—have ideas above their station:‘Formerly they were all Nancies and Pollies and Sukeys and Dollys—Now they areall Cosmelias and Cornelias and Delias and Celias’ (10r). While humans weretaking on airs, the gods were descending to earth: Jupiter ‘came on as an Irish man’(13v). English society is no longer stable; it has been turned on its axle tree by therevolution of private theatricals. The physical transformations wrought by trans-forming a home into a theatre are just as disruptive. In an anecdote that resemblesthe plot of Powell’s farce Private Theatricals, Dibdin tells of a merchant who returnsfrom a long voyage to find his warehouse transformed into a theatre: ‘his bales ofcanvas were all cut into scenes his muslins and silks ^turned^ into Turkish habitsand Harlequin Jackets’ (147r). The merchant ‘was distracted and yet I believe hewould have borne it pretty well if his wife had not insisted on his playing Romeo’(147v). His only way to stop the theatricals and rescue his business is to behave as ifhe were in a public theatre, so he recruits some friends, ‘^made^ a riot in the house^damned the play^ tore up the benches’ (147v). Like Powell (‘of the CustomHouse’), Dibdin’s sympathies are with the down-to-earth merchant dealing in solidcommodities, rather than with the performers who transform everything into theexotic and marvellous.

A PRIVATE REVOLUTION

To some extent, Dibdin did not satirize private theatricals more thoroughly orengage with them more deeply because the nature of his practice was mild satire onmiscellaneous human oddities. As Kevin Gilmartin reminds us, loyalism does notpreclude social criticism.39 Moreover, Private Theatricals was largely a vehicle forhim to package up some of his old anecdotes and introduce new songs that he thensold individually. Yet there might be a specific reason and some larger motives forhis soft-pedalling. The specific reason is that he might himself have been involvedin theatricals. According to one source, he was ‘one of the principal hands in theWargrave Theatricals of 1790–91’.40How Do You Do?, a short-lived periodical thatDibdin co-wrote with the actor and writer Francis Godolphin Waldron, carriedsympathetic reviews of a private theatrical company which performed regularly in

39 See Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution.40 Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 4. I have not found support for this claim in the

standard sources on Barrymore, but ‘Pasquin’ (Williams) notes that Dibdin composed the overture fora new pantomime of Robinson Crusoe (attributed to Sheridan), which was performed at Wargrave inSeptember 1790 (Earl of Barrymore, 19).




Tottenham Court Road.41 The reviewer was evidently familiar with the amateuractors. More generally, there are affinities between his entertainments and thenature and culture of private theatricals. His one-man shows were billed as ‘tableentertainments’. The format implied a kind of domestic intimacy between per-former and audience. Primarily, these billings were a ruse designed to evade thelicensing laws. In 1747, Samuel Foote found a way of evading the TheatricalLicensing Act by inviting his ‘friends’ to drink a dish of tea or chocolate withhim and then incidentally offering a theatrical performance. Henry Fieldingfollowed suit.42 Yet they also attest to a blurring of boundaries between publicand private and are part of a larger cultural experiment that opened up entertain-ment to a wider group of participants than professional actors at the patent theatres.The way Dibdin presented himself and his venue mingled the professional and thedomestic in several respects.His new theatre had some of the amenities of a genteel home: ‘there will be two

very elegant drawing-rooms’, he purred in the press.43 His stage resembled ‘“a vastand superb vestibule”, with a perspective view of “a large and beautiful garden”behind it’.44 Admission to private theatricals was usually by invitation only; Dibdintreated his audience like invited guests, writing personal letters ‘to the residencesof those persons of distinction, whose warm and attentive solicitations have doneMr. DIBDIN so much honour’. However, he also had letters sent ‘to every Ladyand Gentleman of title or respectability with whose address he can possibly furnishhimself ’.45 This is not a personal invitation but a mail-shot; he had to make aliving. Nonetheless, as observed in Chapters Five and Seven of this volume, hismanner was intimate. During the intervals, Dibdin would mingle with the audi-ence and chat with his patrons.46While satirizing private theatricals, Dibdin might also have learnt from them.

Although they might not have conceived of their activities in this way, mono-polyloguists, dilettanti, spouters, and miscellaneous entertainers in minor theatreswere all pressing up against the legitimate theatre, challenging its cultural andfinancial dominance. Both the scant press coverage Dibdin’s one-man showsreceived and the media storm that destroyed the dilettante theatricals organized

41 Dibdin and Waldron’s How Do You Do? appeared fortnightly from July to November in 1796.Detailed reviews headed ‘PRIVATE THEATRICALS, TOTTENHAM-COURT-ROAD’ appearedin all but the first issue. The group, not to be confused with the Pic Nic Society, was headed by ‘severalgentlemen’ who had raised a subscription to produce plays twice monthly on Thursday evenings. I amgrateful to David Kennerley for drawing this to my attention.

42 Similarly, Mathews dubbed his shows ‘At Homes’. See Ian Kelly,Mr Foote’s Other Leg (London:Picador, 2012); Martin C. Battestin with Ruth R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London:Routledge, 1989), 435; Richard L. Klepac, Mr Mathews at Home (London: Society for TheatreResearch, 1979).

43 The World (27 September 1791).44 General Magazine and Impartial Review (October 1791), quoted in Fahrner, 135. This

publication shows an image of Dibdin on the stage.45 The World (1 October 1791). 46 Fahrner, 122.

Judith Hawley106



in Tottenham Street by the Pic Nic Society were shaped by the opposition of thepatent theatres to what they perceived as encroachments on their territory andchallenges to both their cultural status and their box-office receipts.47 Though notpolitically radical, both Dibdin and the dilettanti set themselves against the theat-rical establishment and participated in the revolution that eventually led to theoverthrow of the monopoly of the patent theatres.48

47 The press campaign against the Pic Nic Society, probably orchestrated by Richard BrinsleySheridan, harped on the threat that amateurs supposedly posed to the patent theatres. See, for example,The Morning Chronicle (26 February 1802); The Theatrical Repertory, or Weekly Rosciad, 26 (16 March1802); The Times (17 March 1802). David Francis Taylor sees the source of Sheridan’s opposition tothe Pic Nics as partly professional and partly class-based. See his Theatres of Opposition: Empire,Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 239–41.

48 See Moody, Illegitimate Theatre. Worrall describes ‘the Government’s role in enforcingregulation, monopoly and censorship’ in Theatric Revolution, 18. Thomas Dibdin railed against theproliferation of London’s minor theatres in his Reminiscences, 2 vols (London, 1837), 2:394–7.




Interlude 2Dibdin and Jane Austen

Musical Cultures of Gentry Women

Nicola Pritchard-Pink

Singing was a vital accomplishment for young genteel women at the turn of thenineteenth century, and girls were expected to soothe wearied fathers andentertain family and friends through their musical performances. This injunctionlies behind many of the collections of sheet music amassed by young gentrywomen from this period. Yet a closer inspection of these collections—and themusical library of Jane Austen in particular—reveals that this was far from theonly reason why these young women collected and performed music. Austen ‘wasfond of music’, practising every day, and ‘in the evening she would sometimessing, to her own accompaniment, some simple old songs’.1 Three of her personalsongbooks survive, containing 151 pieces.2 Of all the known composers ofAusten’s individually collected songs, Charles Dibdin is the most prominent.Austen owned at least eight Dibdin songs, including ‘Bachelor’s Hall’, ‘PoorOrra Tink of Yanko Dear’, ‘Sound Argument’, ‘The Joys of the Country’, ‘TheLamplighter’, ‘The Lucky Escape’, ‘The Soldier’s Adieu’, and ‘The Woodman’.While, as we shall see, Dibdin’s expectations for female domestic singing centredon the traditional values of femininity and moral instruction, Austen’s song choicesreveal a different approach. By examining these songs it is possible to glimpseAusten’s use of her song collection as a means of interrogating and playfullyreconfiguring contemporary ideologies surrounding feminine musical culture.As well as being a prolific composer, Dibdin wrote several manuals on the subject

of music. In The Musical Mentor, aimed at boarding-school girls, Dibdin combinedmusical theory with moral guidance in order to demonstrate ‘how far a sweet

1 J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002), 70.

2 Hampshire Record Office (HRO), 28A11/A3, A7–A8. In addition, over twenty songs are listed inElisabeth M. Lockwood, ‘Jane Austen and some Drawing-Room Music of her Time’, Music & Letters15/2 (1934): 112–19. Together these represent only a proportion of Austen’s total compilation ofmusic, as ‘a large collection of music by the most celebrated composers’ was sold by auction when thefamily moved to Bath, as noted in the Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette (4 May 1801). Moreover,female relations and friends would have shared their music collections with her, further extending herrepertoire.



accomplishment may strengthen us in our moral duties’.3 Both the educational textand the lyrics of the practice songs are heavily didactic, instructing girls ‘to cherishthe moral, . . . to store the mind with . . . instruction and amusement, . . . and to bewiser, better, and more enlightened’ when singing.4 Dibdin’s highly genderedsongs include ‘A Portrait of Innocence’, ‘Constancy’, and ‘Vanity Reproved’,demonstrating how he utilized song to dictate specific gender attributes. Perhapspartly in response to these cultural expectations, the majority of Austen’s songs areon the appropriately feminine subjects of love and sentimentality. Religious musicwas also recommended as being particularly appropriate for young women, andDibdin comments that ‘the best music the world has produced is that which hasbeen composed in honour of the Deity’.5 This resonates with other conduct-bookauthors, such as James Fordyce, who recommended that women limit their songchoices to those with ‘elevated or virtuous’ lyrics.6Displays of feminine attributes such as modesty could also be exhibited through

performance technique. Dibdin compares singing to reading aloud, encouraginggirls to sing with tender expression, minimal artificiality, and ‘truth and nature’.7Through empathetic characterization, sweet simplicity, and an absence of affect-ation, young women could harness the power of song to command, and hencemorally instruct, an audience, as Dibdin advises in his educational poem TheHarmonic Preceptor:

Let them sing all that’s natural, easy, and plain;By expression, and feeling, the mind let them gain;. . .

So shall singing the senses pervade and control;And the influence of sound be received by the soul.8

On one level, Austen appears to have heeded such advice. When comparing herown voice to that of the famous soprano Miss Stephens, Austen noted that ‘hermerit in singing is I daresay very great; that she gave me no pleasure is no reflectionupon her, nor I hope upon myself, being what Nature made me on that article’.9An abhorrence of showy professionalism in preference to demure modesty inperformance style added to the image of the feminine ideal.And yet, simultaneous to these more conventional displays of femininity,

additional identities were also being explored. We see this in Austen’s personalcollection, particularly in her choice of Dibdin songs, through which she couldparticipate in and comment on wider narratives, far beyond what Dibdin and otherconduct writers prescribed as suitable material for female performance. Indeed,although performed in a domestic setting, singing for the entertainment of familyand friends should not be seen as a purely private activity and needs to becontextualized alongside other forms of domestic performance. As noted by Judith

3 Mentor, 51. 4 Ibid., 31. 5 Ibid., 48.6 James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (Dublin, 1767), 189. 7 Mentor, 47.8 Charles Dibdin, The Harmonic Preceptor (London, 1804), 137.9 Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters (4th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 272.

109Dibdin and Jane Austen



Hawley in Chapter Six of this volume, amateur theatricals were popular in Austen’sfamily, and she inhabited her characters ‘with great spirit’.10 By performing asdifferent characters, young women could take part in a discursive form of role-play,experimenting with different identities. In this way, women could utilize singingto express individuality as well as engage with sexual, national, imperial, social, orpolitical tropes.Dibdin claimed that modern music was being saturated with the ‘vilest trash’,

professing by contrast that ‘in everything I have written, even in my comic songs,I have warmly inculcated morality’.11 Yet, as may be seen in the texts of Dibdin’scomic songs held by Austen, he was far from prudish, often using bawdy humour tohighlight social and sexual hypocrisy. In ‘Lamplighter Dick’ the singer takes on therole of the cheeky lamplighter who witnesses sordid sexual encounters:

Each formal prude and holy wightWill throw disguise away,And sin it openly all night,Who sainted it all day.12

In a similar vein, ‘Sound Argument’ mocks the sexual inconstancy of women byfirst advising men to ‘chuse a wife to whom truth and honour are given’ but thenconceding:

But honour and truth are so rare,And horns, when they are cutting so tingle,That, with all my respect to the fair,I’d advise him to sigh and live single.13

While such comic sexual references were an integral part of Dibdin’s aim toentertain as well as instruct his Sans Souci audiences, Austen’s ownership of themdemonstrates that women were certainly not excluded from this culture, despiteDibdin and others’ recommendations that they should confine themselves to morechaste material.The majority of Austen’s songs, including those by Dibdin, are from a male

perspective in first-person narrative, giving her freedom to express masculine char-acters. In ‘Bachelor’s Hall’ Austen could sing of the boisterous adrenaline-fuelledmale-only activity of hunting. As several of Austen’s brothers hunted, being ableimaginatively to participate in a completely different cultural narrative could haveempowered her to share in, and comment on, a world ostensibly limited to men. Bydeliberately selecting songs that subvert gender expectations for her collection,Austen created opportunities to question contemporary notions of femininity,express a personal sense of humour, and actively inhabit alternative identities.14

10 Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004), 164.

11 Life, 3:42. 12 HRO, 28A11/A7. 13 Ibid.14 Although it is possible that Austen collected such songs in order to accompany male relatives

or friends, a nephew recalled that ‘at Chawton she practiced daily, chiefly before breakfast. I believe

Nicola Pritchard-Pink110



Austen held many songs relating to the arduous yet noble life of sailors, includingDibdin’s ‘The Lucky Escape’, which could reflect a similar attempt to engage in thelives of her brothers, two of whom were sailors. Austen rarely personalized lyrics, yetmade an exception for Dibdin’s ‘The Soldier’s Adieu’, in which she struck throughthe word ‘soldier’ and replaced it with ‘sailor’.15 By choosing to sing aboutbrave sailors, Austen could actively participate in Dibdin’s patriotism; as henoted: ‘I have brought prominently forward those men whose valour has insured,and will perpetuate, the glory of their country’.16 Indeed, songs such as ‘TheSoldier’s Adieu’ revel in the duty, honour, and bravery of fighting men, celebrat-ing a heroic life amid ‘thundering cannons’ and ‘murdering carnage’.17 By singingin the character of such men, Austen could explore masculine and martialidentities quite different to the stereotypical portraits of feminine subjectivity insongs recommended by conduct writers.Alongside patriotism, vocal music could be used to facilitate women’s participa-

tion in imperial narratives. ‘Poor Orra Tink of Yanko Dear’ requires the amateursinger to employ a strong dialect and impersonate a simple island native. LikeDibdin, Austen was talented in characterization, and by imitating poor Orra,Austen could have explored her place in Britain’s expanding empire and partici-pated in concepts of cultural hegemony. Such identities may have enabled her tofeel renewed connections with family abroad and far away at sea.Several of Austen’s songs contain a strong element of political and social

commentary, similar to the incisive, mocking humour of her novels. These include‘The Joys of the Country’ and ‘The Woodman’ by Dibdin. Their lyrics offer acritique of modern society, a far cry from the limitations of ‘virtuous’ lyricsrecommended by conduct-book writers. ‘The Joys of the Country’ provided Austenwith a witty satire on the practicalities of country life, a subject she may have relatedto, living most of her life in the Hampshire countryside. Here the singer gentlyridicules the picturesque ideal by noting for example:

How sweet in the dogdaysTo take the fresh air,When to save you expenseThe dust powders your hair.18

Similarly, ‘The Woodman’ compares the simple purity of the trees felled by thewoodcutter to their transformation into objects of vice and corruption:

Art may shape his falling trees,In aid of luxury and ease;. . .

Thou pamper’st life in every stage;Mak’st folly’s whim, pride’s equipage.19

she did so partly that she might not disturb the rest of the party who were less fond of music.’Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 70.

15 HRO, 28A11/A3. 16 Life, 3:42. 17 HRO, 28A11/A3. 18 Ibid.19 The Vocal Encyclopædia (London, 1808), 130–1. ‘The Woodman’ is listed by Lockwood.

111Dibdin and Jane Austen



By selecting such songs for her personal collection, Austen could have used music toarticulate social and political commentary, providing an empowerment very differ-ent from Dibdin’s expectations of female music-making.Through exploring Austen’s collection of Dibdin’s songs we can see the clear

discrepancies that existed between the contemporary cultural ideologies for womenand the reality. By personalizing their music collections, women such as Austencould not only reflect an acceptable femininity but also broaden and interrogate it.In contrast to the advice of conduct books, Austen enjoyed many raucous, satirical,and political songs, while only one sacred song was present in her entire collec-tion.20 Through song-collecting and singing, Austen utilized composers such asDibdin to explore social and political matters while also expressing issues relevant toher sense of personal and familial identity. While detailed accounts of Austen’s ownmusical performances are rare, the contents of her song collection neverthelesssuggest both a keen participant in amateur music-making and an approach to songthat strayed far beyond the rather narrow diet for young middle-class and gentrywomen recommended by conduct writers, and by Dibdin. Austen’s choice of theDibdin songs examined here could therefore be viewed as an expression of herhumour, national pride, family relationships, and country lifestyle, as well as herplace in the expanding empire and her role as a woman in society at large. Her songchoices were no doubt influenced by factors such as age, geography, practical access tomusic, and the current musical tropes of her friends, family, community, andcountry. Yet, although Austen started singing in girlhood as a rite of passage, shechose to continue expanding her song collection throughout her lifetime, clearlydemonstrating her sense of the positive value of personal expression through singing.

20 Handel’s ‘I know that my Redeemer Liveth’ is listed by Lockwood.

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PART II

SONGS IN FOCUS



7‘True Courage’A Song in History

Oskar Cox Jensen

Given the march of specialization across the nineteenth century, it is unsurprisingthat such a miscellaneous man as Dibdin was remembered for a statisticallynegligible portion of his output: the sea songs. For above a generation, Dibdinwas a giant, thanks solely to these songs. Thus the European Magazine in June1811, when he had finally retired: ‘In the inferior branches of literature, the publicare indebted to no living individual more than to Mr. Dibdin . . . every one whosings his songs, or who hears them, gives and receives a lesson even in their mirth.’1Eight years later, five after Dibdin’s death, the reformer Francis Place wrote of thecultural changes since the 1790s, when the French Revolution prompted a delugeof reactionary propaganda: ‘These loyal songs were succeeded by Dibdin[’]s SeaSongs, and the old blackguard songs were in a few years unknown to the youths ofthe rising generation.’2 And in 1838 the composer William Gardiner reviewed thesame period: ‘A new order appeared of naval songs . . .Dibdin, it is said, wrote morethan a thousand. No other music was heard in public or private. They increasedwith our victories, but . . . are now nearly forgotten.’3 This volume moves beyondDibdin’s naval association—but it cannot be neglected entirely. These quotationsprovide a starting point, tying Dibdin’s sea songs to a temporal context: Englandduring the wars of 1793–1815.4 They focus attention on the songs’ utility—instructive, loyal, patriotic—whilst stressing their ubiquity. This cannot be explainedby politics alone, as the question remains: why Dibdin? There were hundreds ofloyalist songwriters, from anonymous artisans toWilliamCobbett andHannahMore.None had a fraction of Dibdin’s success. If we understand his songs’ place in Englishsociety, both during and after his lifetime, then we learn much about both the songsand the society.

1 Cited in Fahrner, 165.2 Francis Place, Manners and Morals. BL, Add. MSS 27825, f. 144–5.3 William Gardiner, Music and Friends: or, Pleasant Recollections of a Dilettante, 2 vols (London,

1838), 1:227.4 Dibdin’s impact in Wales and Scotland was negligible, and he was a pariah in Ireland: Fahrner,

154.



I do not pretend, in a single chapter, to take a total view of these songs. Whilstthe sea songs represent a minor fraction of Dibdin’s work, they still numbered‘about ninety’; a comprehensive survey would sacrifice both depth and nuance.5 Byfollowing one song, I emulate this volume’s broader approach: a single thread mayguide us through a labyrinth of issues. In choosing ‘True Courage’ I have been ledby two considerations. Firstly, its remarkable wealth of contextualizing material.Secondly, it is not ‘Tom Bowling’. In order to do justice to this rare degree ofpresence—for a single song—in the broader historical narrative, I will structuresections of analysis around sequential stages in the song’s history: its composition;its initial performances by Dibdin; its commercial dissemination; its appropriationas propaganda; its reception in that context; and its place in Dibdin’s legacy. This isan approach designed to span intellectual disciplines as well as a century of history.Its chronology begins, not in the song itself, but in the ideological contexts of itsconception c.1798.

COMPOSITION

‘He was a melodist—not a musician.’6 So wrote Edward Taylor, Gresham Professorof Music, in 1837. The comment sums up the judgement of the musical estab-lishment during and after Dibdin’s lifetime. As early as 1768, the Theatrical Registeraccused him of ruining his ‘sometimes pleasing’ melodies ‘by setting instrumentalaccompaniments, that . . . are generally contrary to all the rules of harmonic com-position’.7 Posterity too praised the tunes but belittled the arrangements, seizingupon Dibdin’s scant training and his autodidact’s approach to musical theory.8 Inconsequence, we approach his compositions expecting strong, simple melodies andcrude accompaniments.To subscribe to this verdict is to bypass the central ideological struggle of English

music in the later eighteenth century. It was a debate heightened by the counter-Revolutionary conflict—one in which national character, morality, and order wereas much at stake as principles of composition. Rev. Dr John Aikin’s famous essayon songwriting attacked ‘the luxury of artificial harmony, taking place of the simplegraces of melody’.9 For the composer William Jackson, discussing both vocal andinstrumental music, ‘Melody was in a barbarous state until the last hundred years.It long continued improving, but now seems, in this country at least, to be in a fairway of shortly losing it’s [sic] existence.’10 Innovations were mere ‘paltry shifts toconceal the want of Air’.11 The soul of music—melody—was under threat.

5 Life, 1:6. 6 Taylor, f. 24. 7 Fahrner, 28. 8 Life, 1:21–3.9 John Aikin, Essays on Song-Writing. With a collection of such English songs as are most eminent for

poetical merit (London, 1810), 9–10.10 William Jackson, Observations on the Present State of Music in London (London, 1791), 10–11.11 Ibid., 17.

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Loaded terms—‘luxury’, ‘barbarous’—suggest this was more than the eternalcomplaint levelled at innovation: that there are no decent tunes in jazz/punk/rap/techno. These concerns were eloquently expressed in the writer Alexander Molleson’s1806 essay, ‘Melody the Soul of Music’.12 Beginning with the verse ‘Harmonicgrandeurs choral joys impart, / But melody can move the feeling heart’, Mollesonviews melody as analogous to conversation, a key tenet of British Enlightenmentthinking.13 He finds ‘refined harmonic music’ problematic, a ‘mere chaos’, both‘popish’ and ‘scientific’.14 The cardinal sin of modern harmony lies in making ‘almostan entire separation between music and poetry’.15 ‘Simple and pathetic melody’,by contrast, is closer to both speech and the ‘voice of nature’, and thus ‘penetrates tothe heart, and excites the corresponding affections’.16 In short, ‘good music isfavourable to virtue’.17This was a potent argument in the context of ideological conflict with Revo-

lutionary France, both in terms of melody’s utility in uniting the people, and in itsBurkean rejection of the metaphysics espoused by dangerous philosophes. A plain,unadorned melody was ‘British’, and a composition modulating through keysand experimenting with discords was ‘foreign’ (if not necessarily French). But‘simplicity’ was intelligently theorized, and its pursuit could involve sensitivityand philosophical conviction.It is clear from Dibdin’s pedagogical writings that he shared a belief in simplicity,

a sense that it was threatened by German innovation, and that he privileged therelationship between song and conversation.18 This was not xenophobia, as he tookfor his model the Italian school.19 Nor was it anti-intellectual. Rather, Dibdinassociated complexity with a mechanical want of understanding: ‘Superficialdelight, afforded by flighty and extraneous pleasure, is to be dreaded . . .Beginnot, therefore, with the finger, but the mind [or risk] a total ignorance of expressionand sentiment.’20 This was the rhetoric of taste as much as of the national idiom;Dibdin’s reasoning appears as indebted to aesthetic theory as to a sense of thenational.21 His conception of conversation and music as plain, sincere, and in somesense egalitarian was largely derived from Addison and Steele earlier in thecentury—yet the heightened political agitation of the 1790s redoubled the needto practise and protect these virtues.22 The same caution guided his empiricism: ‘Itis nonsense to talk of theory without practice . . .Theory is a chaos of science. It isthe harmony in music . . . to which habit, the child of certainty, must add melody

12 Alexander Molleson, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Glasgow, 1806), 47–137.13 Ibid., esp. 54, 59. For conversation, see esp. Mee, Conversable Worlds.14 Molleson, Miscellanies, 48, 63, 77. 15 Ibid., 82. 16 Ibid., 47–8, 54.17 Ibid., 66.18 Mentor, 2–3, Charles Dibdin, A Letter on Musical Education (London, 1791), 23–4; Ibid., 16;

Life, 1:xxiii–xxiv, 42.19 Dibdin, A Letter, 23, 27–8. 20 Mentor, 32, 31.21 An extension of this argument might pursue a parallel course to that in Denise Gigante, Taste:

A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). My thanks to Ian Newman forthis suggestion.

22 Mee, Conversable Worlds, 6, 38, 40–3. Mee’s reading of the poet William Cowper offers strikingparallels to Dibdin. See ibid., 168–77.

117‘True Courage’



and lend beauty. It is a universal remedy that applies to nothing.’23 Here is thatBurkean scepticism in which the chaos of the scientific was given greater resonanceby the chaos incarnate in the Parisian Terror.24In discussing ‘True Courage’, then, we should appreciate the ideology beneath

Dibdin’s simplicity. The particular circumstances of its composition reinforce thelink between song, sociability, and conversation. Taylor gives us Mary AnnDavenport’s eye- and ear-witness account: ‘I went to Ealing, where Mr. Dibdinthen lived, to dine with him . . .Dibdin went into the garden, round which hecontinued to walk till dinner was announced. On entering the room he said “I havewritten a song since I left you,” and after dinner he repeated it. The Song was “TrueCourage”’.25 The story seems implausible, yet it squares with Dibdin’s generalpractice. He was exceptional, not only in the speed of his writing, but in beingboth composer and lyricist. ‘The same impulse that inspired the words, hasgenerally given birth to the music, and those that are the most celebrated, havebeen produced with the least trouble . . . I could mention, perhaps, thirty veryprominent songs, that did not take in the writing and composing more than threequarters of an hour each.’26 This set Dibdin apart: elite songs were written bysetting an established poem to new music, and vernacular songs by the oppositeprocess. What now seems obvious was then an exceptional position, at least withinthe context of loyalist songwriting: ‘The music must be sorted to the mode ofexpression as well as the sentiment itself; and thus, there must be a kind of give andtake accordance between the music and the words, which is indispensibly [sic]necessary to heighten the effect of both.’27 If ‘True Courage’ was written in thecourse of an evening’s dining, then it speaks to Dibdin’s rare talent for composingthe complete song, and accords with his belief in song’s simple, conversationalaffect. Its composition—by a walker in a garden, not a scholar on a stave—alsoexplains its success when performed by unaccompanied street ballad-singers, andconsequently it was bought to be sung at home by purchasers who had never seen,let alone played, a pianoforte.Dibdin did, however, write a piano accompaniment—probably just for publi-

cation, as his common practice was to perform, as a street singer would, with onlythe lyrics before him.28 Assuming this accompaniment roughly corresponds toDibdin’s own playing—there is no reason to doubt it—then this gives us ablueprint for the song, self-published in 1798, with the first verse set and thesubsequent three written beneath. To contrast with and complement the score,given in Example 7.1, a recording of the vocal is available to stream or download athttp://soundcloud.com/napoleonandbritishsong/31-true-courage-342.

23 Observations, 1:223.24 For a synopsis of the Burkean position, see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the

Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 2–12, 19.25 Taylor, ff.17–18. 26 Life, 3:6. 27 Ibid., 1:xxiv. 28 Observations, 1:138–9.

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Example 7.1. Charles Dibdin, ‘True Courage, written & composed by Mr. Dibdin, andSung by him in his New Entertainment, called A Tour to the Land’s End. Pri.1s. London,Printed & Sold by the Author, at his Music Warehouse, Leicester Place, Leicester Square.’London, 1798. The C in the bass for bar 10 is corrected to a B♭ in later editions.




Example 7.1. Continued

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Example 7.1. Continued




There was bustling Bob Bounce, for the old one not caring,Helter skelter, to work, pelt away, cut and drive;Swearing he, for his part, had no notion of sparing,And as for a foe!—why he’d eat him alive.But when that he found an old pris’ner he’d wounded,That once sav’d his life, as near drowning he swam;The lion was tam’d, and with pity confounded,He cried over him just all as one as a lamb.That my friend, Jack or Tom, I should rescue from danger,Or lay my life down for each lad in the mess,Is nothing at all;—’tis the poor wounded stranger;And the poorer, the more I shall succour distress:For however their duty bold tars may delight in,And peril defy, as a bugbear, a flam;Though the lion may feel surly pleasure in fighting,He’ll feel more by compassion, when turn’d to a lamb.The heart and the eyes, you see, feel the same motion,And if both shed their drops, ’tis all to the same end:And thus ’tis that ev’ry tight lad of the oceanSheds his blood for his country, his tears for his friend.If my maxim’s disease, ’tis disease I shall die on,—You may snigger and titter, I don’t care a damn!In me let the foe feel the paw of a lion,But the battle once ended, the heart of a lamb.

In sum: four eight-line verses, set in a traditional strophic form, with line sevenrepeated once and the first phrase of line eight repeated twice prior to the finalphrase. To some degree, this is a generic song. Yet there is some merit to positioningthe song within Dibdin’s conception of musical meaning. The exercise will beinstructive in appreciating a song’s musical implications in the contemporaryimagination—even if some of its hearers, illiterate and unversed in tonality, wouldhave been oblivious to Dibdin’s intent.Dibdin’s fullest elaboration of musical meaning is in his Musical Mentor.

Though written for young women, its strictures accord with his other works,whether addressed to fathers or written as dialogues for self-improving appren-tices.29 He invested meaning in the song’s key (F major), time signature (3/4), andtempo (allegretto). F is the simplest ‘flat’ key—‘a hearty character, and his music issolid and gratifying’.30 For simplicity’s sake, he allowed only two time signatures:‘Common time, which . . . is an unruffled ocean’, and that of ‘True Courage’: ‘Tripletime, which moves in threes, is the same ocean a little more agitated, with a rippleon the surface . . . I shall, therefore, call common time reason, and triple timepleasure.’ Whilst pleasure was ‘delightful’, the risk of 3/4 was that in extremis,‘the heart is robbed of every thing rational, and pleasure is turned into frenzy’.31

29 Dibdin, A Letter, and Music Epitomized: A School Book (4th edn, London, 1811).30 Mentor, 40. 31 Ibid., 37.

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Though he avoided excess, Dibdin cautioned against the opposite danger regardingtempo: ‘Allegretto is . . .music played moderately quick. The great fault is playingand singing too slow; by which means singers particularly lose their spirit, anddrawl out the words.’32‘True Courage’ stood at the bolder end of his spectrum: hearty, agitated, spirited,

pleasurable. Its accompaniment is typical Dibdin, eschewing ‘fashionable’ arpeg-gios, preferring simply to mirror the vocal part in the right hand, generally a thirdbelow the melody, his favourite interval, with the bass completing the chord.33‘One grand rule . . . is never to overload your accompanyment’; by simply followingthe melody, ‘you relish the sense of the music with additional pleasure, and giveyour playing a ful[l]ness and grace which . . . I call playing with feeling and senti-ment’.34 This was also pragmatic: Dibdin sold to as wide a market as possible, and acomplex piano part could deter amateur purchasers.Twice, however, Dibdin bends his rules by including ‘improper’ accidentals.35

The B naturals in bar forty-three heighten the dramatic effect at a critical lyricaljuncture. This accidental, a sharpened fourth, is one of only two he excuses ongrounds of ‘beauty’.36 But in bar nine of the unusually extended introduction, thekeynote itself is sharpened—common enough in contemporary instrumentalmusic, but almost unknown in popular song.HereDibdin breaks his own injunctionagainst the ‘exquisite pleasure’ of such effects as ‘extraneous and suppositious’,considering it the composer’s ‘duty . . . to keep them properly in check’.37This vocabulary—impropriety, duty—resonates with the song’s lyric, a senti-

mental exhortation to compassion in warfare. Dibdin appreciated the socio-political importance of his songs; by stretching his own rules in ‘True Courage’he risks purity for the sake of affect, needing to ‘delight’ if his message is toconvince—and his song to sell. Much of this message inheres in the biblicallyallusive lion/lamb theme with which each verse ends. Dibdin recycles himself here:‘Jack Ratlin’, from his 1784 comic opera Liberty Hall, featured the couplet ‘In fighta lion:—the battle ended / Meek as the bleating lamb he’d prove’. From 1798,however, the image became associated with ‘True Courage’, due largely to thecomplementarity of words and music. The seventh, ‘lion’ line is doubled, beforeattention focuses on the resolution on the tonic: ‘lamb’. Organized in a conven-tional AABC form, the ‘C’ section of bars 53–68, to which these lion/lamb lines areset, is striking. Its stop-start rhythms are insistently martial. Its vocal range is widerthan the rest of the verse. The melody is remarkably, repeatedly angular, from theascending steps of ‘furious lion’ to the octave intervals of ‘duty appeas’d’. Tocontemporaries, this was unmistakably military music, a stirring rhetorical ‘anchor’that gave way to the sweetness of the closing ‘lamb’, and the section of the songlikeliest to lodge in the mind.Elsewhere, the lyric displays Dibdin’s lightness of touch in combining sentimen-

tality with a sailor’s vernacularisms (‘You may snigger and titter, I don’t care adamn!’) and jargon (‘pelt away, cut and drive’). Though no sailor, he endured gales

32 Ibid., 41. 33 Ibid., 42; 49–50. 34 Ibid., 50, 49. Original emphasis.35 Ibid., 35. 36 Ibid., 44. 37 Ibid.




in the Bay of Biscay and two days’ storm in the Channel, waters notorious for theirhostility.38 Born in Southampton, he had early exposure to sailors’ vocabularywhich he took pains to refresh, befriending a smuggler in 1785 with the goal of‘mending my nautical knowledge’.39 ‘True Courage’, in all aspects, was the con-sidered production of a consummate professional.

PERFORMANCE

For Dibdin, this professionalism was not synonymous with specialization; he wasalways the first performer of his solo songs. ‘True Courage’ was introduced on6 October 1798, and premiered in London on Saturday 1 November in Dibdin’ssolo entertainment, A Tour to the Land’s End.40 To publicize his homecomingafter an extensive tour, Dibdin advertised in the Morning Post, a popular dailysold for sixpence, on 31 October. The ticket prices—two to five shillings—indicate an affluent but not aristocratic audience. The venue was Dibdin’s owntheatre—though he was known to give supplementary daytime performances atthe Paul’s Head Assembly, a fashionable City watering-hole, at four shillings aticket: Dibdin cultivated the aspirational middling sort.41 The aim was to be‘light, chatty, informal, and intimate’, in a space where a nautical railing, raisedplatform, symmetrical candelabra, and exotic canopy focused attention upon theperformer.42 A sketch of this space, included in the Pocket Magazine’s guide tonumerous venues, may be seen in Figure 7.1.From this position, as Judith Hawley has noted in Chapter Six of this volume,

Dibdin would engage in extemporary conversation with waggish auditors in the pit.This format drew the repeat custom of, for example, the bookseller Richard Ryan,as well as the antiquarian John Britton, who recalled, ‘At this rational, amusing, andinstructive school of song and music, I spent many pleasant evenings between1796 . . . and 1810.’43‘True Courage’ came third in the final ‘part’. Top billing went to ‘Nelson and

Warren’, a topical adaptation of his own ‘Nelson and the Navy’. Like the othernineteen songs, ‘True Courage’ was preceded by a ‘recitation’, in this case on‘Compassion’. The song and recitation on either side were sequenced to provide acontinual contrast: ‘My business has been as much as possible to give an oppositeeffect to the songs, as they succeed each other . . . I, therefore, leave the subject of asong gradually, get into extraneous matter, and then bring the audience into thatstate of temper which best inclines them to relish the song which is to follow.’44Here we see the miscellaneous Dibdin, child of the eighteenth century, fulfillingexpectations of variety within the potentially monotonous one-man show, manipu-lating his audience in prose and leading them through the succession of moods so

38 Life, 2:272–4. 39 Observations, 1:170. 40 Fahrner, 225, 149.41 Hogarth, 1:84. 42 Fahrner, 123, 146. 43 Ibid., 147. 44 Life, 3:274–5.

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integral to late-Georgian taste.45 This fragment from Dibdin’s papers may resemblethe recitation preceding ‘True Courage’:

These are the sentiments inspired by real valour . . .They know the awful ordeal theyhave to pass; and, though as soldiers they despise it, as men they feel it—nay fear it—fear it for the dear peace of those connections on whose joy hangs their best delight[;]fear it lest premature fatality should stop the carreer [sic] of their glory by which theyseek to deserve the name of soldier and subject. Fear it lest fortune should deprive themof the greatest and truest enjoyment a hero can experience to stay unnecessary carnageto preserve the life of a friend or to administer the balm of comfort to the misiries [sic]of a conquered foe . . . For this exalted enjoyment the brave well risk their lives[.] Forwhere is there perfect goodness and transcendant magnamitity [sic] so gloriouslyblended as in his heart who with the sword of courage bears the shield of benevolenceand extends the laurel to secure the olive[?]46

To a modern ear, this might sound pompous. Yet the actor John O’Keeffe, who sawa solo show in 1792, wrote only of ‘a few lines of speaking’—a plain, intimate effectalso attested by George Hogarth, who attended in his ‘early youth’, and Taylor,

Figure 7.1. Thomas Rothwell after Benedictus Antonio van Assen, ‘Sans-Souci’. FromPocket Magazine (London, c.1796). Engraving. Courtesy of the Trustees of the BritishMuseum.

45 Weber, The Great Transformation, esp. 13–18.46 BL Add. MS 30967 Charles Dibdin: Fragments, f. 161.




who saw A Tour to the Land’s End at Norwich in 1799.47 Britton’s view—‘rational,amusing, and instructive’—concurs. We should conceive of the experience as anenlightened exercise in improving, diverting conversation, closer to salon culturethan the Victorian music hall.In performing ‘True Courage’, this rational objective was advanced by Dibdin’s

‘peculiar mode of singing’.48 According to Hogarth, he would ‘deliver his songwithout further reference to book or music. His voice was a barytone [sic] . . . of nogreat power or compass, but of sweet and mellow quality. He sang with simplicity,without any attempt at ambitious ornament, but with a great deal of taste andexpression; and, being a poet as well as a musician, he was particularly attentiveto a clear and emphatic utterance of the words.’49 William Kitchiner, a friend ofDibdin and more sycophantic than Hogarth, agreed: ‘He had a remarkablydistinct articulation; so that . . . every word he uttered was easily intelligible; forhe had that sensible idea about Vocal Music, that the true intention of it is, torender the Words more impressive.’50 Taylor states that, during A Tour, ‘therewas no attempt at what we call singing, Dibdin’s first object being to make everyword of his songs distinctly heard’, adding that ‘although I have heard his songsmuch better sung . . . I have never heard the same kind of effect produced by themas when he sung them himself ’.51 All, moreover, praised his piano playing.We should not mistake this distinctive delivery for incompetence: Dibdin wrote

eloquently on this topic, combining classical analogy, first principles, and scholarlyprecedent, stressing the importance of ‘distinct articulation’.52 The crux, again, wasthe comparison to speech: ‘I compare singing to reading aloud, in the exercise ofwhich merely uttering of words will not do; their sense must be impressed on themind of every hearer. The reader must possess ease, eloquence, and grace.’53Performances of ‘True Courage’ typified Dibdin’s ideal: to instruct by affect, andto affect by employing the natural arts of the good speaker. Coming at the end ofthe most talkative decade of a conversational century, it is small wonder that ‘TrueCourage’ struck home.

DISSEMINATION

In pursuing the means by which that ‘striking home’ extended beyond the audienceof the Sans Souci, we must consider issues of both exploitation and innovation—for it is tempting to depict Dibdin, in some ways a traditionalist, in others suitedto the 1790s, as also ahead of his time. As an autodidact singer-songwriterof vernacular lyrics simply delivered, he anticipates 1960s America. As a self-publishing, self-financing entrepreneur breaking free of the corporate music indus-try, touring to promote new material, he prefigures artists of the digital era: ‘[As]I knew it was the business of the music-sellers to recommend their wares, in the

47 O’Keeffe, Recollections, 2:322. 48 Ibid. 49 Hogarth, 1:xx.50 Kitchiner, 24. 51 Taylor, f. 12. Original emphasis.52 Mentor, 42, 45–8. 53 Ibid., 47.

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country in preference to mine, so I should defeat in some measure their intentions,and greatly extend the circulation of those articles my catalogue contained, were I toperform my different entertainments, occasionally, and so let my songs speak theirown recommendation.’54By 1798, Dibdin was selling his songs individually, each comprising four pages

of music and lyrics with a variation for two flutes thrown in, priced at a shilling—sixpence cheaper than the London average.55 These were available directly fromDibdin on tour, or at his Music Warehouse in Leicester Place. In the case of ‘TrueCourage’, he subsequently sold the same impression via Bland and Weller at 23Oxford Street; identical scores are extant from 1800 and 1814.56 He was tooexperienced to sell its copyright, however; these editions were ‘printed for theAuthor’. By these means, his profits vastly outstripped the paltry sums once paidhim by publishers.57To judge by its legacy, ‘True Courage’ sold well. Its wider dissemination,

however, was by pirated editions sold as single halfpenny slips and in cheapchapbooks, accessible to the poorest labourer, chimney sweep, or scullery maid,sold by ballad-singers themselves scarcely distinguishable from beggars. Dibdin,who had played a female ballad-singer in an afterpiece of 1769, The Jubilee,acknowledged this trade.58 Discussing the value of the lyrics in The ProfessionalLife, he took to ‘reckoning the songs at a halfpenny a piece’: ‘With all these thestreets have echoed, and barrel-organs and other mediums have proclaimed theirpopularity, totally without my participation.’59By definition these publications were ephemeral, yet many extant copies of

‘True Courage’ survive. Table 7.1 lists twenty-three separate editions from differentprinters, approximately nine of which were published in Dibdin’s lifetime inLondon, York, northern England, and Edinburgh. These were surprisingly accur-ate, although one Newcastle garland from 1805 censored ‘damn’, and only one ofthe very first, by London’s John Davenport, credited Dibdin.60 These productionsgave the lyrics only, usually without indicating lines to be repeated. This wasstandard practice; broadsides of traditional ballads with repeats, such as‘The White Cockade’, also omitted these.61 The tune could only be learned byear. In the mixed print/oral culture of the street ballad, the seller would sing untilthe purchaser had it by heart. With ‘True Courage’, the interest lies in how ballad-singers, poor and musically illiterate, learned the tune. They may have employed analternative air, but its distinctive rhythms make that unlikely. It is more likely thatsingers learned the tune from either Dibdin’s performances or a private function.Street singers could save for a cheap gallery seat, or linger outside with an ear to thedoor.62 It is no coincidence that the cities where ‘True Courage’ appeared duringDibdin’s lifetime were fixtures of his regional tours. And though ballad-singers did

54 Life, 4:117–18. 55 See esp. the British Library volume of scores G.381.56 BL G.383 (12), R.M.13.e.8. (1). 57 Life, 3:40–1. 58 Fahrner, 31.59 Life, 4:327 and 1:6. 60 BL 11606.aa.24 (48) is the censored copy.61 e.g. Bod. Harding B.15(372b).62 e.g. The Surprising History of a Ballad Singer (Falkirk, 1818), 14; John Thomas Smith, A Book for

a Rainy Day (London, 1845), 137.




not frequent drawing rooms, ephemeral printers of ‘True Courage’ such as JohnMarshall and John Pitts did, and may have taught the tune to their sellers. Indeed,the lead song in one garland containing ‘True Courage’ was ‘A New Song, Sung inCharacter, at the Masquerade, at Brayton House, Cumberland ’.63 The path fromprivate performance to piracy could be short.‘True Courage’, composed whilst walking in a garden with only the barest

accompaniment, was—like most of Dibdin’s songs—perfectly suited to appropri-ation by ballad-singers. Its phrases are regular; it coheres strongly and keeps to asingle key. Its tempo, plain yet colourful language, and memorable melodiccontours make it ideal for a lusty rendition on a busy street. Its evident popularity,attested by the number and continuity of editions across England, reminds us thatsocial barriers were permeable: a cultural product of one milieu—here, the politeLondon stage—could be appropriated and enjoyed in a place as remote as Penrith,by persons as removed from polite society as beggars and farmhands. By hearingand singing ‘True Courage’, a celebration of the common sailor, these individualswere participating in constructing the nation by propagating a patriotic song—anation thus more widely and indeed democratically defined than many loyalists

Table 7.1 Unauthorized extant editions of ‘True Courage’ in cheap print.

Date (range) Printer, Location Format Source

1798–1822 J. Morren, Edinburgh Chapbook Harvard, Lane Catalogue 59:221800 Anon., London Songster Sky Lark1800–2 J. Davenport, London Single slip V&A, S.1244-19861801–5 J. Evans, London Chapbook Bod. Curzon b.24 (99)1802 Ann Bell, Penrith Chapbook BL, 11606.aa.23 (13)1802 J. Jennings, London Single slip Google books1803–48 J. Kendrew, York Broadside Bod. Harding B.11 (3895)1805 Anon., Newcastle Garland BL, 11606.aa.24 (48)1810–31 J. Marshall, Newcastle Garland A Garland of New Songs1813–27 G. Angus, Newcastle Chapbook Newcastle UL, Robert White Collection 36:71815 J. Paxton, South Shields Garland BL, 11621.a.3 (15)1819–44 J. Pitts, London Broadside Bod. Harding B.11 (626)c.1820 W. F. Collard, Bristol Broadside Cambridge, Madden 18371820–24 R. Hook, Brighton Single slip R. Hook Catalogue of Songs1820–29 C. Pigott, London Single slip Bod. Harding B.16 (38b)1835 J. Ferraby, Hull Single slip BL, 74/1870.c.2 (165)c.1835 W. Tegg, London Songster Cyclopaedia of Popular Songs1838–59 Ryle & Paul, London Broadside Cambridge, Madden/London

Printers 5, no.596c.1848 T. Goode, London Songster Model Song Book, vol. iic.1850 T. Birt, London Broadside Birt Catalogues II, no.2891863–85 H. P. Such, London Broadside H. P. Such’s Catalogue of Songs, no.6941865 S. O. Beeton, London Songster Beeton’s Book of Songs1868 R. De Witt, New York Songster Paddle Your Own Canoe Songster

63 BL 11606.aa.23.(13).

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would like. Whilst Dibdin did not profit directly, he viewed this wider impact as amoral imperative.64 However, the moral health of the nation and the financialhealth of Mr Dibdin were not always in perfect harmony.

‘TRUE COURAGE ’ AND JAMES PLUMPTRE

The primary association of Dibdin’s sea songs is with the loyalist movement, whichaimed to persuade the British to unite against the French invaders. Closely allied tothis was the moral reform movement. Dibdin’s songs were seen as crucial to both.He encouraged this, writing that ‘duty might assist inclination, and therefore as aprominent feature in my labours, I sung those heroes who are the natural bulwarkof their country . . . I thought therefore the subject honourable, and commendable,and in some degree novel; especially as it would give an opportunity through publicduty of expressing private affection.’65 Though this secured Dibdin his reputationand an annual state pension of £200, it alienated much of his public, who wereeither averse to mixing politics and pleasure or not themselves loyalists, and hisovertly patriotic performances cost him both money and audience.66 This despitethe mildness of Dibdin’s own politics.67 His was an ambivalent relationship withFrance. He spent nearly two years there, absorbing its culture and philosophy.68 Heread Voltaire and Molière, loved the language, and called it the home of theatreand literature—but professed a ‘rooted dislike’ for the majority of the French.69Yet of his thousand songs, very few feature the French as enemies. Just ten from1793–1814 make pejorative remarks—they are ‘fearful’ or ‘poor fools’.70 Hispatriotism was sentimental, introverted, and inclusive, focusing on the heroism ofthe ordinary British sailor.‘True Courage’ is the epitome of this: Dibdin at his most demotic. In 1797,

Britain was rocked by naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. Mutineers’petitions employed Dibdin’s rhetoric in defence of their conduct, making particularuse of the lion/lamb image from 1784’s ‘Jack Ratlin’.71 Dibdin’s wilful revival ofthe metaphor the very next year must have been in part an effort to rehabilitate thereputation of the sailor, a controversial move that underlines the nuanced andindividualistic nature of his patriotic writing. For though ‘True Courage’ was wellreceived by other loyalists, it was not beyond reproach.James Plumptre, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and vicar of Hinxton, was a

leading activist in the moral and loyalist movements. In 1803 he tried his hand atsongwriting, employing Cambridge’s Professor of Music Charles Hague to set his

64 Life, 1:xxi–xxiii and 3:42. 65 Ibid., 1:xxii.66 Ibid., 4:6–9; Charles Dibdin, Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin; with a Memoir (3rd edn, London,

1852), xxviii.67 Life, 4:9. 68 Ibid., 1:154–210. 69 Ibid., 2:84–5, 1:207.70 Cox Jensen, Napoleon, 57–8. 71 Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 99.




lyrics to music.72 When that failed, he turned to Dibdin, soliciting permission touse the latter’s songs: ‘I wrote to him, requesting to know which of his Songs werealready become public property, and of those which were still his own, whether hehad any objection to some being inserted in my collection; expressing a wish insome instances, to correct them.’73 Unsurprisingly, Dibdin refused to give Plumptrefree use of either the songs, or the words alone, ‘saying, that wherever his songs wereso introduced, they were piracies’.74 He merely sent Plumptre The Professional Life,whereupon the latter found there were ‘an hundred and ten, out of the six hundredsongs [therein], which, upon the whole, I highly approve’—though, from the‘fastidious’ Plumptre, this was praise indeed.75 ‘True Courage’ was one of those110, though even here Plumptre had objections: ‘The Devil is called by the familiarterm of . . . the old one; which is making light of that which we should only think ofwith horror and detestation. In “True Courage,” v.4. the Sailor says, “I don’t care ad—m!” which I would alter to . . . “I don’t mind your bam!” or banter.’76 He alsoremarks, ‘The first verse of “True Courage” is so beautiful, I must quote it entire’—and in so doing, errs in the very first line, omitting ‘that’ from ‘Why what’s that toyou’, ruining the rhythm.77Ultimately, Plumptre succeeded in securing leave to use the songs. It appears that

Dibdin, financially distressed, sensed the way the wind was blowing, and tookadvantage of any opportunity to refashion himself as a moral public servant,availing himself of the patronage and free publicity of reformers.78 Yet Dibdinwas a very different writer to the likes of Plumptre, an over-scrupulous scholar withno sense of rhythm. In employing colloquialisms (‘the old one’) and profanities(‘damn’), Dibdin displays the common touch that was central to his popularity—and absent from the sermonizing productions of Plumptre and his peers, fromHannah More to Thomas Spence. As Dibdin remarked: ‘A sermon and a song,even a comic song, may have the same drift, and produce the same effect. The song,written to please, may be so managed as to instruct; and the sermon, writtenprofessedly to instruct, will attract more attention if it be so managed as to please.’79Dibdin’s songs were always ‘written to please’. Unlike his amateur activist contem-poraries, he never mistook the singer’s stage or pitch for a pulpit.

A SONG IN WARTIME

Subsequent years proved Plumptre’s initial instinct to be right: Dibdin’s songs wereindeed a powerful force in constructing a particular vision of the martial, moralnation. In 1808, a Rowlandson caricature of British sailors below decks featured

72 James Plumptre, A Collection of Songs, Moral, Sentimental, Instructive, and Amusing, 3 vols(New edn, London, 1824), 1:v.

73 Ibid., 1:lvii–lviii. 74 Ibid., 1:lix. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 1:lxiii–lxiv.77 Ibid., 1:lxx.78 Ibid., 3:v–vi, and idem, Letters to John Aikin, M.D. on his volume of Vocal Poetry (Cambridge and

London, 1811), xxix–xxx, 7.79 Life, 1:xxiii.

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one of Dibdin’s creations: one of the three tars is called Jack Junk.80 By Jack’s feetlies a well-worn broadside, its title just legible. It is ‘True Courage’, serving asshorthand for the patriotic tar fully ten years after its first publication. Memoirs,particularly of 1803 when fear of invasion peaked, reinforce this connection. For asongwriter who took pains to engineer a receptive audience, the pitch of anxiety,patriotism, and farce experienced in parts of the country was a perfect backdrop.The publisher Charles Knight recalls his schooldays with a Dibdinesque blend ofthe heroic and the comic: ‘In the same bedroom with me slept a son of CharlesIncledon. He had inherited the glorious voice of his father, and nightly he kept usawake with some of Dibdin’s most stirring songs. One day the rumour came to usthat the French had landed . . . Surely it was not time for lessons when all Englandwas going forth to fight; so we boldly petitioned for a half-holiday.’81 The memoryof Dibdin’s songs is thus incorporated in a playful patriotic narrative. This is echoedin the memoir of Mary Lisle, in 1803 the precocious eight-year-old daughter of aGloucestershire rector.

The songs of the period added . . . to the enthusiasm of the people; they were thun-dered out over the dinner-table amidst the rattling of glasses and thumping of fists,they were whistled beside the hay-cart and harvest-wagon, and Dibdin made ourvessels echo to the same patriotic and heroic sentiments. Who shall say that that wasnot true poetry which stirred the hearts of all classes so deeply? There was one song ofDibdin’s called ‘True Courage’, which was for ever in our ears that summer.82

Lisle’s account has social and spatial implications. ‘True Courage’ worked in avariety of communal and solitary situations: convivial, domestic, and rural; adultand juvenile; polite and popular. ‘Cousin Charles hummed it over his books, andsang it in his rambles and idle moments, till our hearts throbbed beneath itsinfluence. Will Wild whistled it in the stable, and Edward was perpetually shoutingit out at the top of his voice.’ Primarily the song is bold and stirring as Dibdinintended, an inspirational aid to work and recreation. Yet Lisle’s own renditions arelullabies: ‘Eleanor and Agnes sang it together in their own room, and I murmured itto my doll as I rocked her to sleep in my arms, or tried its narcotic qualities upon amischievous restless kitten that I called my own.’ Given the normative associationsof her age and gender, this repurposing is understandable, utilizing the melody’ssweet, relatively understated qualities—yet it remains significant that young girlsaccessed and enjoyed such a martial song, even in a nursery context.83 Nor is itnecessarily voiced, but hummed, whistled, murmured, and sung to an uncompre-hending kitten: the lyrical sentiment may be implicit, but it is not essential toperformance. Nor, significantly, is the song ever accompanied. This not only aidedits dissemination by ballad-singers; it multiplied almost infinitely the possiblespaces and occasions for domestic enjoyment.

80 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Nautical Politeness or British Sailors perusing the Dispatches from Cadiz’(etching and stipple, hand-coloured. London, 1808). British Museum 1948,0214.697.

81 Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, 3 vols (London, 1864), 1:58.82 Mary Lisle, ‘Long, Long Ago:’ An Autobiography (London, 1856), 67–8.83 See Nicola Pritchard-Pink, ‘Dibdin and Jane Austen’, Interlude Two of this volume.




Lisle ends: ‘The air and the words are now ringing in my brain, and I must quotethem’—and she does so, admitting, ‘I quote from memory, and I may thereforehave transposed the verses, or altered a word or two.’84 She gives four ‘verses’. Theseare actually verses one and two, each split in half: three and four are omitted. She is,however, near perfect in her transcription, merely substituting ‘danger’ for ‘the oldone’. It is unsurprising that, after fifty-three years, Lisle fails to recall the entirety ofa long, strophic song. The length of ballads decreased across the period, partly dueto the shortening of attention spans in the establishments that ultimately evolvedinto music halls, and partly due to a shift from strophic narratives to through-composed settings of a single subject.85 ‘True Courage’ was perfectly suited to thestart of the century. It would not survive the next hundred years unaltered.

AFTERLIVES

In 1857, the antiquarian Charles Manby Smith included Dibdin among suchluminaries as Shakespeare, Burns, and Byron in a list of literary greats still foundamong the ballad stock of London’s Seven Dials.86 In 1894, the folk collectorSabine Baring-Gould, also discussing current broadsides, was surprised to discoverthat ‘the Poet Laureate is unrepresented; even Dibdin finds but grudging admis-sion’.87 These observations, though they chart a decline towards 1900, indicate theenduring popular appeal and robust elite reputation of Dibdin’s songs. Indeed,most ephemeral editions of ‘True Courage’ postdate Dibdin’s death in 1814 (seeTable 7.1). They demonstrate that the song not only endured into the 1860s; itspread. Though many stem from London (from whence they circulated widely),the song also went west, to Brighton, Bristol, even New York.Aside from minor typographical errors and the occasional censoring of ‘damn’,

these left ‘True Courage’ untouched. The same cannot be said of four posthu-mous scores. The first, produced by Kitchiner in 1823, is the most dutiful.88 Thesecond, from Hogarth’s 1842 compilation, was arranged by the composer FrancisLancelott.89 He follows Kitchiner’s minor melodic amendments, also rewritingthe final cadence in a manner that, whilst formally correct, is affectively irresolutein the resolution: see Example 7.2.Lancelott’s (re)arrangement begins with ‘oompah-pah’ chords reinforcing the

song’s nautical associations before moving to decorous arpeggios that would haveproved too much for Dibdin. This ‘True Courage’ is a safe parlour song, seeking to

84 Lisle, ‘Long, Long Ago’, 68.85 Bertrand H. Bronson, The Ballad as Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 1969), 204; Anthony Bennett, ‘Music in the Halls’, in Jacky Bratton (ed.), Music Hall:Performance and Style (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 1–22.

86 Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London; or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London,1857), 253.

87 Sabine Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals: Some Chapters in the History of Man (2nd edn, London,1894), 218.

88 Kitchiner, score no.93 (unpaginated). 89 Hogarth, 2:202–4.

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dress the plain ballad in civilized clothing. The next, from London in 1854, was‘Sung by Mr. Travers in his entertainment, entitled Nelson, the Life of a Sailor’.90Travers omits verses two and three in line with the trend for abridgement in themusic-hall era. But in giving the tempo as Moderato, he commits what was forDibdin a cardinal sin: playing too slowly. Travers alters ‘I don’t care a damn!’ to ‘Icare not to sham!’, a typically Victorian revision mirrored in the music. He followsLancelott’s changes, varies his harmonic intervals, and includes what Dibdin called‘improper’ accidentals in the instrumental passages. The final edition comes from acollection priced for a mass market, published in London and New York in 1890.91The arranger, Dr William Alexander Barrett (the ballad-collecting editor of theMusical Times) admits his editing: he had to update the style whilst selling theantiquity (Dibdin’s dates are in the title). He works from Travers, moving fromoffbeat chords to arpeggios and giving the tempo as Moderato. Yet the complexarrangement, full of accidentals and elaborate chords, belongs to a new era. Thepauses and leaps of Dibdin’s melody are tamed by the accompaniment, incorpor-ated into a sophisticated whole.These scores highlight two points. Firstly, their cumulative nature places ‘True

Courage’ in an active repertoire, rather than as a historical curiosity. Secondly, theability of ‘True Courage’ to assimilate change demonstrates its inherent versatility,longevity, and attraction. The legacy of ‘True Courage’mirrors Dibdin’s own—itsharmonic attributes the subject of condescension, its tune and lyric venerated.92Accounts discuss it as performed, not as an abstract work. The anonymousJ. R. wrote in 1828 of ‘those heroes . . .who have gone to battle, singing “TrueCourage” ’.93 Henry Lee, a Somerset stage manager, spoke in 1830 of its influence,indicating by allusion that the lyrics had become common usage: ‘I think the

Example 7.2. Charles Dibdin arr. Francis Lancelott, ‘True Courage’, bars 44–50, inHogarth, vol. 2, 204.

90 BL H.2520 (11).91 William Alexander Barrett (ed.), Twenty-One Songs Composed by Charles Dibdin. 1745 –1814.

(London and New York, [1890]), 36.92 Kitchiner, 9–10, 26–9, Taylor, ff. 13–16, 20–24, Hogarth, 1:v–vi, xii–xxvi, and Henry

G. Thorn, Charles Dibdin, one of Southampton’s Sons (Southampton and London, 1888).93 ‘J. R.’, ‘Monument to the late Charles Dibdin, Esq.’, in The Crypt, or, Receptacle for Things Past 2

(1828): 286.




character of an English sailor has been . . . greatly fashioned by the influence ofDibdin’s songs. The sailor has been taught to think and to be . . . “A Lion in battle,and afterwards a lamb!” ’94 Also in 1830, a series of lithographs, Illustrations ofDibdin, were published by a firm specializing in devotional imagery. Only ‘TrueCourage’ survives, acquired by the BritishMuseum in 1842 and reproduced here asFigure 7.2.The lines paraphrased by Lee are printed below the image. The artists jettison

Dibdin’s vernacular overtones, producing a solemn composition so potently mas-culine that it now appears homoerotic. The massive bulk of the sailor owes a debt tothe actor T. P. Cooke, equally celebrated for playing Jack Tars and Frankenstein’smonster, whose representations heavily influenced polite perceptions of sailors.95 Inthis image, later nautical melodrama demonstrates both its debt to Dibdin and itsrole in ensuring that ‘True Courage’ remained relevant.Plainly, the song was not merely memorialized. The young Henry Russell—later

famed for writing ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’—had an 1834 residency at the SansSouci, where he was ‘giving his audience all Dibdin’s songs in succession. Russell isthe most genuine and hearty singer of them—perhaps the best—since Incledon;and as we listened to the good old song of “True Courage” the other night, the littlecabin of a theatre rung again with the manly tones of the singer, and the applausesof the audience.’96 As this implies, Russell was not the only singer of Dibdin in the1830s. Dibdin’s illegitimate son Thomas asserts that the benefit concert of 1824, apublic festival sponsored by ‘Sailor Bill’ himself, the Duke of Clarence (laterWilliamIV), featuring ‘the most eminent vocalists of the day’, conducted by Parry andaccompanied by the same T. P. Cooke, was key to reviving his repertoire.97Thomas’s account is supplemented by an advertisement for Dibdin’s scores,

available from two leading firms, Novello and Purday. This commercial consider-ation accords with William Weber’s Great Transformation of Musical Taste, inwhich musical nationalism in the 1830s, the success of indigenous vocal concertsfrom the 1830s to the 1850s, and the ballad concerts of the 1850–70s all provided acommercial platform for Dibdin, whose songs generally featured prominentlytowards the end of each programme.98 Yet his works flourished at a cost. Dibdin’sself-fashioning in his later years in sympathy with the moral-loyalist campaignsmeant that, in the context of increasing specificity and thematization of concertprogramming and musical thinking, his legacy was reduced purely to the sea songs,at the expense of the vast majority of his output. In concerts of the 1850–60s, ‘TrueCourage’ found a place primarily in programmes themed around the Navy.99

94 Henry Lee, Memoirs of a Manager; or, Life’s Stage with New Scenery, 2 vols (Taunton, 1830), 2:12.95 Louis James, ‘Taking Melodrama Seriously: Theatre, and Nineteenth-Century Studies’, History

Workshop 3 (1977): 151–8.96 Spectator 292 (1 Feb 1834): 9.97 Thomas Dibdin, Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin: With a Memoir (2nd edn, London, 1841), xxx–

xxxii.98 Weber, The Great Transformation, 72, 157–9, 276, 285–6.99 ‘A Visit to the Victory’, Morning Post 25195 (3 October 1854); ‘Advertisement’, Cheshire

Observer and General Advertiser 48 (7 April 1855); ‘Polytechnic Institution’, Standard 11557 (26August 1861).


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Figure 7.2. George and James Foggo, ‘True Courage’. From Illustrations of Dibdin. London,1830. Lithograph on chine collé. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.




So dominant did this reductive association become that the author WilliamHarvey, writing in 1862, mistakenly attributed to Dibdin the famous anthem‘Heart of Oak’, written by William Boyce and David Garrick in 1760.100 Theerror is understandable, given that Thomas Dibdin included ‘Heart of Oak’ andother ‘naval and national’ songs in an addendum to an 1841 collection of his father’ssongs.101 So powerful was this naval theme that as late as 1900, the noted musicolo-gist and antiquary William Cummings lectured on the subject, stressing the songs’role in ‘the re-manning of our navy at a critical period of our history’. So powerful wasour song that Cummings ended his discourse by commenting, ‘Some of [Dibdin’s]songs, notably that entitled “True Courage”, might well be revived.’102

100 ‘Aleph’ [William Harvey], London Scenes and London People (London, 1863), 349.101 Thomas Dibdin, Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibdin, with a Memoir and

Addenda (London, 1841), 301.102 The Musical Times 41/693 (1 November 1900): 748.

Oskar Cox Jensen136



8A Motley Assembly

‘The Margate Hoy’

Harriet Guest

Charles Dibdin’s ballad ‘A Voyage to Margate’—or ‘The Margate Hoy’, as it cameto be known—formed part of his afterpiece, Christmas Gambols, first performed inDecember 1795 at his theatre the Sans Souci at 411 Strand, opposite BeaufortBuildings, and subsequently repeated after the theatre moved to Leicester Square inthe summer of 1796. The song is of the kind categorized in the Oracle newspaper’sreview or puff—for despite the contempt Dibdin expressed for puffs,1 this has thelook of one—as ‘strong humour’, contributing to the general object of the entertain-ment, which was ‘broad farce; to which perversion of words, quaint misconceptions,and other modes of provoking a laugh, are surely fair’.2 It involves a cast of charactersaboard a Margate hoy, one of the broad-bottomed barge-type sailing vessels thatferried goods and passengers between the City of London and the Thanet resort. Thesong’s framing narrative takes the voice of Commodore Kelson (whose name exploitsthe convention of identifying sailors with parts of ships). He is introduced to theother passengers on the deck, and then comments with knowing amusement on theirresponses to the voyage, the humour of the watermen, and the seasickness and fear ofdrowning that seemed an almost inevitable part of the journey.The stanzas of the ballad are interspersed with passages of spoken dialogue, a style

Dibdin may have used during his musical tour of 1786, when he performed what ahostile commentator identified as a ‘whimsical farrago of recitation and music’,3 butwhich he increasingly favoured in his later years as his voice deteriorated and he foundthat the arrangement played to the strengths of his performance style. As JudithHawley and Oskar Cox Jensen discuss in Chapters Six and Seven of this volume,Dibdin used the confined spaces of the Sans Souci theatres to address his audienceswith an animation and informality that must have added to the sense of participatingin something like a parlour-room entertainment, and that style would have beenenhanced by fluent and rapid movement between different modes of articulation.

1 See David Kennerley’s discussion in Chapter Five of this volume.2 Oracle (28 December 1795).3 Benjamin Crosby, Crosby’s Pocket Companion to the Playhouses. Being the Lives of All the Principal

London Performers (London, 1796), 5. Dibdin also recited his own poetry during performances.



THE WORLD AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM

In ‘The Margate Hoy’, the first stanza lends substance to the nautical character ofthe commodore:

Standing one Summer’s day on Tower slip,Careless how I my time should em-ploy,It popp’d in my head that I’d take a tripA-board of a Margate Hoy;I took a few slops, such as shirts and a coat,For of prog I knew well they’d be stor’d,Then I hail’d a pair of oars shov’d off my boatAnd a-way I dash’d a-board . . . 4

Talk of ‘slops’ and ‘prog’—mariners’ terms for clothes and provisions—is notopaque, but is colourful enough to flesh out his professional identity. A spokeninterlude follows, in which the commodore and his acquaintance, Mrs Garbage thealderman’s wife, hail one another by name, and she then introduces him to theother passengers on the deck.

‘What, Mrs. Garbage! How is the Alderman?’ ‘There is my husband, Sir,’ ‘Pon myword and dicky I declare.’ ‘Give me leave, Commodore, to introduce you to myfriends: Mr. Shadrack, Commodore Kelson, Commodore Kelson, Mr Shadrack.’ ‘Verymuch at your sharvice, Sir.’ (Interlude 1)

As Kelson rather laboriously exchanges names with each character in turn, I imaginethat Dibdin would have displayed his skills as a character actor, perhaps adjusting hiscostume and modulating his voice and accent to suit the different parts. He mighthave added some improvised dialogue to embellish satirical portraits of their distinct-ive gestures and tones in the style that is more explicitly indicated in his later songon ‘The Masquerade’, where directions call for ‘Conversation among the characters’,and later ‘Confused conversation among the characters’.5 He would probably dothe parts in different voices, like an early music-hall turn sharing a well-worn jokewith an audience for whom familiarity—in several senses—provided a comfortablesense of inclusion and intimacy. The interlude marks a distinct departure from the‘recitation’ used to introduce the song, in which a bucolic character identified as‘an old blunt squire’ repeatedly exchanges the ‘compliments of the season’, andcomically laments that ‘for Christmas cheer they make you eat nine meals anddrench you with liquor enough to scald a pig’. We can readily imagine that thetransition to the modern mix of city types aboard the hoy would have played toDibdin’s strengths as a character actor.6

4 Kitchiner, no.59, ‘The Margate Hoy’, verse 1 (all further refs in text).5 ‘The Masquerade,’ in [Charles Dibdin] Songs, &c. In New Years Gifts. A New Entertainment of

Sans Souci. Written, Composed, Spoken, Sung, and Accompanied By Mr Dibdin (London: printed for theAuthor, 1802?), Part 3, 59–61.

6 BL Add. MS 30960: Table Entertainments vol. 1, In ‘Christmas Gambol’ section, reverse of f. 76.

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TheMargate hoy provided rich possibilities for Dibdin to nurture the fascinationwith human diversity of which he writes in the preface to his 1803 account of TheProfessional Life. Representing himself as a prototypical subject, he claims, ‘Theworld, as social system, I never could comprehend. It always exhibited to my view amonstrous and unfathomable gulph [sic], filled with contradictory and heteroge-neous materials, in which the various passions and desires are hurled about atrandom; restless, errant, and disjointed.’ In words incongruously reminiscent ofWollstonecraft’s Vindication (1792) or Hays’s Emma Courtney (1796), he portraysmankind as trapped by the futile excess of its own desires in a system where ‘everything is pursued, nothing attained’, and ‘All have their particular pursuits, yet all arelost in the multitude; everything appears the same, yet every thing varies.’7 Margatemight be said to afford a microcosm of this view. The town had developed sincemid-century into the favoured resort for Londoners in search of health or apleasurable break from city life. Available to those further down the social scalethan the courtiers and professional elites who frequented Brighton orWeymouth, itoffered the less-wealthy polite, the would-be fashionable, and the fashionable butdisreputable the chance to restore their finances while enjoying the social life ofthe resort over the summer, and provided City dignitaries with a stage for theconspicuous display of their wealth. Most distinctively, it gave tradespeople theopportunity to taste with their families the leisure and high style they morehabitually supported in the lives of their customers. It was not expensive to travelto Margate from London on the hoy, and concerned philanthropists sent some ofLondon’s sick poor to recuperate there, using the facilities of the Sea BathingHospital after it opened in 1791.The perception of modernity as blurring social distinctions, differences becom-

ing lost in the multitude where everything appears the same, which is so frequentlycommented on as a source of anxiety in the second half of the eighteenth century,found a focus in Margate, where commentators repeatedly noted, often with someamusement, that tradesmen could not be distinguished from the aristocrats theywere supposed to serve, and fine ladies might be mistaken for fishwives. JohnWolcot, writing under his pseudonym Peter Pindar, observed mockingly that, werethe hoy to fail in its voyage to Margate:

Great were the loss of gentlefolks from Wapping,Who, fond of travel, unto Margate roam,To gain that consequence they want at home.

At Margate, how like Quality they strut!Nothing is good enough to greet their jaws;Yet, when at Home, are often forced, god wot,To suck, like Bears, a dinner from their paws:—8

7 Life, 1:x. For further discussion of the passages from Hays and Wollstonecraft that I mention, seeHarriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 2000), Chapter Twelve and especially 296–301.

8 John Wolcot [Peter Pindar], ‘Ode to a Margate Hoy’ [1792], in The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq.,5 vols (New edn, London, 1812), 3:64.

139A Motley Assembly



Dibdin, in his two volume Tour through almost the whole of England (1800–2),narrates a version of the tale so frequently attached to the resort, observing that the‘most curious’ characteristic of the place is the ‘motley assembly’ it attracts, andcommenting on the resulting confusion of social differences which means that theshopkeeper who uses obsequious and ‘insinuating manners’ to cheat the aristocratin Town here dashes past him whispering that ‘it is a shame for such fellows to lookhonest tradesmen in the face, when they are so deep in their books’.9 Dibdin assertsthat the Margate hoy is the site for the ‘most curious instance of this equalizingsystem’, for though the trip at its best was no more than an eight-hour ‘jaunt in apleasant yacht’, it could in bad weather involve three days of confinement, in which‘high, low, rich, poor, sick and sound are all huddled together without discrimin-ation’, all encountering ‘the great variety of peculiarly revolting circumstanceswhich must inevitably attend the dispositions, the tempers, and the necessities ofsuch a motley crew, so jumbled into all those chances of distress and inconveniencewhich from that situation alone could possibly arise’.10In the Tour, the narrator focuses his sympathy and concern on the threat to

polite sensibilities that the experience of Margate sociability on land and communalsickness on the hoy must pose, which is an indication of the readership he intendsfor his ‘two large and handsome quarto volumes, embellished with forty views andtwenty vignettes’.11 But in his song the shared ordeal of the hoy is a source ofhumour, as the sickness and terrors of the passengers, pleading for the ship to bestopped or for someone to throw them overboard, are ridiculed across fourstanzas of song and two spoken interludes. As the hoy rounds the Nore, wherethe waters of the Thames roughly collide with the currents of the North Sea, thesinger callously observes:

And now ’t would have made a philosopher grinTo have seen such a concourse of muns;Sick as death, wet as muck, from the heel to the chin,For it came on to blow great guns:Spoilt cloaths, and provisions, now clogged up the way,In a dreary and boisterous night;While apparently dead every passenger layWith the sickness, but more with the fright.

‘Oh, Oh, I wish I was at home in my bed!’ ‘Oh, that I was a hundred miles off!’Marshey upon my shins!’ ‘Oh, Oh, will no-body throw me overboard!’ ‘Avast there.’‘Ah my poor dear pattern cap’s blown into the pond!’ ‘Oh my soul, what a devil of asickness!’ ‘Arrah, stop the Ship—Sir, would you be so kind as to be after handing methe caudle cup?’ (Stanza and Interlude Four)

The interlude here again provides the singer with the opportunity to display thefacility with which he mimics accents and adopts different personas. But admir-ation for his talents perhaps also made it possible for his audiences to relish thediversity of the hoy’s passengers, as they are united and mocked in their physical

9 Observations, 1:34. 10 Ibid., 1:34–5. 11 Ibid., 1:Advertisement.

Harriet Guest140



vulnerability. For it seems likely to have been the capacity of the song to representthe characteristic heterogeneity of the modern metropolis that led to its inclusion inthe collection Dibdin’s son Thomas assembled under the patriotic title of SongsNaval and National (1841).

CHARACTERS OF MARGATE

WhenDibdin first advertised the ‘original and novel Amusement, called, CHRISTMAS

GAMBOLS’, he had represented it, in a departure from his usual custom, as possessingsome narrative coherence—as an ‘Entertainment, through the medium of aDomestic Story . . . replete with all that variety of which its subject is capable’.12But it is difficult to reconstruct whatever domestic story it might have told, beyondobserving that each of the main characters seems to have given Dibdin an oppor-tunity to sing a song in their voice. The two songs that the Oracle reviewer rightlypredicted would be ‘uncommonly popular’, ‘The Voyage toMargate’ and ‘Jacky andthe Cow’, were both marked by ‘strong humour’ and apparently designed to displayDibdin’s skills in imitating dialects and accents.13 The characters involved in theMargate song are familiar individually, rather than as a group, from the eighteenth-century stage. A print representing the scene on the hoy, published by John Fairburnin 1804, shows them in characteristic attitudes (Figure 8.1).Central to the scene are the plump figures of Alderman and Mrs Garbage, with

their son Dicky. Their stoutness here is part of the convention that takes physicalgirth to signify vulgar materialism. Her white dress indicates her inappropriatelygirlish vanity, while his cravat of vomit is a mark of the physical discomfort thatresults from excessive consumption—the stout alderman at the seaside is typicallyrepresented as consuming turbot while his wife gambles and drinks. To their left areCaptain Squash and Sir Phelim O’Drogheda, both probably hard-up fortune-hunters of the kind so often represented as a threat to the daughters of rich citymen. In the foreground the quack doctor Quibus doses the aging Dolly Drylipsfrom what looks like a brandy bottle, while behind him Shadrach clutches themoney box of the Jewish merchant (that he is a merchant and money-lender ratherthan a peddler may be confirmed by the jocular waterman’s question, ‘Are you abull or a bear?’ in the second spoken interlude of the song). In a pink skirt is thetypically flirtatious and petite Miss Minikin, a character most familiar from SamuelFoote’s A Trip to Calais, where her mother announces that she will never take aboat trip again, ‘unless a-pleasuring, perhaps, during the summer, in a hoy toMargate’.14 In the left foreground, holding the picnic basket, is a black servant whomay figure Dibdin’s presence in the scene, in allusion to his most successful stage

12 Oracle (25 December 1795). 13 Oracle (28 December 1795).14 Samuel Foote, A Trip to Calais: A Comedy in Three Acts . . . to which is annexed, [with R. Colman]

‘The Capuchin’ (London, 1778), 18. Minikins also appear in Garrick’s Bon Ton; or, High life above stairs(London, 1775) and John Hill’s The Rout. A Farce (London, 1758?), as well as Kane O’Hara’s Midas.A Burletta (London, [1790]).




role as Mungo in The Padlock (discussed by Felicity Nussbaum in Chapter Two ofthis volume). Dibdin remained closely identified with this part, and took pride inthe number of people who claimed to remember his performance, even though heexpressed doubts about the accuracy of their memories.15The familiarity of the characters in Dibdin’s work was clearly important to its

success. Hostile critics suggested that Dibdin was guilty of recycling both the workof other writers and musicians and his own earlier compositions. To give only asmall sample, the Theatrical Review in 1771 accused him of ‘repeated plagiar-isms’,16 and the European Magazine, in a largely sympathetic account of his life andcareer published in 1784, conceded that ‘he does not possess an infinite fund ofvariety’.17 John Williams, writing as Anthony Pasquin, wrote, ‘Like some Miserswho laughably subdivide pelf, / He reviews his own bank and cribs notes fromhimself.’18 Most acidic were perhaps the comments of Benjamin Crosby, whoconcluded in his Pocket Companion for 1796 that Dibdin’s writing was ‘deficient in

Figure 8.1. A Scene on Board a Margate Hoy, as described by Dibdin. London, 7 January1804. Hand-coloured etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

15 See Life, 1:199–200.16 ‘Theatrical Review for December 1771’, in The Theatrical Review; or, New Companion to the

Play-house, 2 vols (London, 1772), 1:303.17 ‘Impartial and Critical Review of Musical Publications’, European Magazine 6 (1784): 360.18 Anthony Pasquin [John Williams], The Children of Thespis (13th edn, London, 1792), 29.

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wit, genius, fancy and invention’, and asserted that in his published songs ‘there isnot a new phrase, nor any expression which has the appearance of originality, whichmay not be found in Roderic Random’.19 Crosby’s comment (presumablyprompted by the name Tom Bowling which Dibdin had borrowed from Smollett’snovel) would have stung, as a close kinship and sympathy with sailors, and theprivileged expertise in nautical vocabulary this produced, were central to Dibdin’sprofessional identity and reputation. For an account of the accusation that Dibdinhad plagiarized Bickerstaff, see David Kennerley’s discussion in Chapter Five of thisvolume.It is, however, certainly the case that in songs such as those which make up the

Christmas Gambols of 1795, characters do not stray from the track beaten by theirtheatrical predecessors and types. But this was of course a critical feature in Dibdin’ssuccess. The EdinburghMagazine observed in 1782, relatively early inDibdin’s career,that his critics often judged him ‘without knowing or remembering’ the range ofworks for which he was responsible, and which tended almost to float free of hisauthorship.20 He worked with clearly recognizable characters who were part of thefamiliar representational currency of everyday life; characters whose clearly demarcateddifferences and distinctions lent stability and clarity of definition to the ‘monstrousand unfathomable gulph, filled with contradictory and heterogeneous materials’which so alarmed and upset Dibdin’s rather cautious and conservative view of theworld, but were also essential to his capacity to extract humour and sentiment from it.He incorporated these characters in melodies the simplicity of which he regarded as amatter of pride and indeed as a national characteristic (as Cox Jensen discusses inChapter Seven of this volume). Those who admired his talents praised the clarity of hisdelivery, which was such that ‘every word he uttered was easily intelligible’, for, asWilliam Kitchiner noted with approval in his memoir of Dibdin, ‘he had that sensibleidea about Vocal Music, that the true intention of it is, to render the Words moreimpressive’.21His ‘remarkably distinct articulation’ and knowledge of ‘when to Speak aWord, and when to Sing it’22 combined with clear melodies and familiar characters tocreate ballads which were perhaps intended to sound as though they had been heardbefore, and to conjure nostalgia for a united nation ruled by the ideal (and conspicu-ouslyfictitious) familyDibdin celebrated in his ‘Ode on theNuptials of the Prince andPrincess of Wales’ (1795).

DIBDIN AND GRAPHIC PRINT

Dibdin’s ‘The Voyage to Margate’, like the comments on Margate in his Tour,builds on the reputation of the resort and the hoy that was already well establishedacross the genres of newspaper reports and gossip, travelogues and sentimentaljourneys, novels, dramatic comedies, and satirical or sentimental verse. But the

19 Crosby, Pocket Companion, 104. 20 Edinburgh Magazine 55 (4 April 1782).21 Kitchiner, 24. 22 Ibid., 24, 25.




Figure 8.2. Charles Catton the Elder,Margate Hoy. London, 19 August 1785. Hand-colouredetching. Auchincloss Rowlandson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University.

Figure 8.3. Isaac Cruikshank, Voyage to Margate. London, 1 January 1786. Hand-colouredetching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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success of Dibdin’s work is not only about performance; in addition to its theatricaland textual aspects, it also draws on graphic satire, and there is an intriguingly closerelation between the song he performed in 1795 and two prints published ten yearsearlier by William Hinton. The earlier of the two is a print of the deck of ‘TheMargate Hoy’ by Charles Catton the Elder, published on 19 August 1785 (thoughobscured text in the darkened space below the credit line gives the earlier date of10 May 1785 (Figure 8.2)).It clearly portrays several characters similar to those who later appear in Dibdin’s

song, including the Jewish merchant and the Garbages, as well as figures who mightbe recognizable as versions of Dolly Drylips, Miss Minikin, and the fortune-hunters. In January 1786, Hinton published a second print showing the deck ofthe hoy by Isaac Cruikshank, titled A Voyage to Margate, which again portrays someof the principal characters from Dibdin’s song (Figure 8.3).We can readily identify in the print, reading from the right to the left, the

Alderman and his wife, the young and attractive girl Dibdin names Miss Minikin,the Jewish merchant, and a middle-aged women (Dolly Drylips?) apparently beingministered to by an older man (Dr Quibus?) who wields a bottle while she throwsup into a bucket. It is of course not at all surprising that there should be a closerelation between the characters depicted in caricatures and on the stage. A print ofDibdin playing Mungo in blackface had appeared in 1769, for example, and therewere at least six different portraits of him in circulation as prints or paintings by thetime of his death. But for prints to have appeared ten years before the representationof a very similar event in a popular song is more striking. And it may be a sign of theclose attention Dibdin paid to graphic material as a source for his songs.In his prose works, Dibdin frequently returns to the theme of the success of his

songs, on which, understandably enough, he liked to congratulate himself. Herecords the sums he had received for many of his entertainments and songs, usuallyrailing against those who had made more money out of them than he had, and healso notes the number of nights performed and copies sold. The posthumous 1823edition of his sea songs, assembled by Kitchiner, provides a convenient compilationof these notes, which demonstrate the keen interest Dibdin took in the marketingof his work. Dibdin notes that he published 10,750 copies of his popular song ‘TheGreenwich Pensioner’, from which he made more than £400, and that ‘Poor Jack’,which he found difficult to shift, had ‘spread itself all over the kingdom’ once hesold it on.23 The European Magazine argued that Dibdin’s extraordinary successderived from his ‘wish to amuse and instruct his countrymen in a manner at oncepatriotic and moral’, and to be ‘in every thing national’.24 And Dibdin representedthe keen interest he took in the circulation of his work and his own increasing fameas supplementary to the patriotism that characterized all of his songs and stemmed‘from inclination . . . and from duty, as a good subject’.25 But what was so distinct-ive about Dibdin’s professional career was the success attributed to him in appeal-ing to mass audiences. Reverend James Plumptre noted that Dibdin’s ‘works

23 Ibid., 19. 24 ‘Memoir of Charles Dibdin, Esq.’, in European Magazine 56 (1809), 172.25 Life, 4:6.




circulate through all ranks, from the elegant drawing-room to the humble cottage,and the vessel upon the ocean’.26 Dibdin himself observes of the six hundred songsincluded in his Life, ‘With all these the streets have echoed, and barrel-organs andother mediums have proclaimed their popularity,’ and claims to have proof that hissongs had been the ‘solace of sailors on long voyages’ (see Isaac Land’s discussion ofthe popularity of Dibdin’s songs among sailors in Chapter Eleven of this volume).27Pasquin observed, without admiration, that Dibdin used ‘Vulgarity’s wiles’ totransform his material, which he repaired and reused like a darned old sock, inorder to ‘illustrate low trash and inveigle base throngs’.28 The mid-nineteenth-century collection of his Songs, Naval and National produced by his son Thomas,however, boasted the patronage of royalty, as well as of the Lords of the Admiralty,and includes an extensive subscription list of the wealthy and titled elite.The size and diversity of the audiences for Dibdin’s songs was obviously

important to his moral and patriotic ambitions as well as to his commercial success.But audience numbers at the Sans Souci were constrained by the size of thetheatres—Dibdin remarked that the measurements of the two spaces the theatreoccupied in succession were the same—and by the price of tickets, which rangedfrom 2s. in the gallery to 5s. per box (or ‘colonnade and bowers’ in the first SansSouci).29 When he performed in Harrogate for one night in July 1800, ticketswere 3s. apiece.30 These prices do not support his ambition to sing for and to ageneral and inclusive audience. Volumes containing collections of his songs madethem available to ‘elegant drawing-rooms’ beyond the theatre, but the mosteffective means of achieving a wider distribution was through sales of slip-songsand song sheets. While Dibdin did not always have any direct control over these, ashe sold many of his songs outright, or wrote them for a fixed payment, and, inaddition, as piracy was rife in the industry, they would nevertheless have contrib-uted to public perceptions of him as a songwriter, and would also have encouragedhim to keep a watchful eye on the song sheets and prints in circulation. Thesecheaper forms varied from slip-songs, sometimes accompanied with a woodcutvignette or design, often costing a halfpenny apiece (e.g. Figure 8.4), to single sheetscontaining detailed images in the body of the song (e.g. Figure 8.5), or pages wherehalf the space might be taken up with a more elaborate printed scene, and whichwere usually sold for 6d. plain or 1s. coloured (e.g. Figure 8.6).Particularly in Dibdin’s later years, from the late 1780s till his death in 1814,

these prints could take the form of quite finely produced drolls, often—thoughby no means exclusively—produced by the publishing houses of Samuel Fores

26 Postscript to James Plumptre, A Collection of Songs moral, sentimental, instructive, and amusing(London, 1805), 32, cited in Kitchiner, 9n.

27 Life, 1:6.28 Anthony Pasquin [John Williams], The Pin-Basket to the Children of Thespis (London, 1797), 70,

and Children (1792), 29.29 See, for example, True Briton (19 March 1795); for ticket prices at the Sans Souci, see

advertisements available at Eighteenth-Century Collections Online.30 Playbill, For One Night Only. Sans Souci. The Inhabitants of Harrogate and its Vicinity are

Respectfully Informed, that on Wednesday, July 23, 1800, at the Theatre, Harrogate, will be performed,A New and Popular Entertainment, called Tom Wilkins (Knaresborough, 1800).

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Figure 8.4. Charles Dibdin, ‘Blow high, blow low’. London, 1794. Song slip, the BodleianLibraries, the University of Oxford, Harding B 11 (334).




Figure 8.5. Charles Dibdin, ‘Jackey and the Cow’. London, 1796. Engraving. © Museumof London.

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(e.g. Figure 8.7) or of Laurie andWhittle (e.g. Figure 8.8, which possibly uses platesproduced under the imprint of Robert Sayer before they took over the business).The prints from Laurie and Whittle can often be found detached from the song

beneath, which might be the result of folding the paper, but might also be a sign ofthe frame-worthy quality of the images.31 In some of the prints published by Fores

Figure 8.6. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Fair’. London, 1793. Engraving, The Bodleian Libraries,The University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection: Ballads, fol. 357a.

31 See, for example, the prominent fold in one Fores edition of ‘The Greenwich Pensioner’: BritishMuseum 1985,0119.125.




the line identifying the date and place of publication seems to have been moved toan awkward position immediately beneath the image, as if to ensure that it will notbe lost when the text beneath is removed. But the preservation of the top half of thesheet where the image appears does seem to indicate the familiarity of the contextfor the image, as though the allusion of title and perhaps the style of the drawing,

Figure 8.7. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Greenwich Pensioner’. London, 1791. Hand-colouredetching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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appropriate to sentiment or humour, is all that is needed to call the song to mind.In prints such as Fairburn’s of ‘The Margate Hoy’, or some of those showing ‘TheGreenwich Pensioner’, only a verse or two of the song is reproduced. The textbeneath the two prints by Robert Clamp (after George Morland) published in1797—‘The Contented Waterman’ (Figure 8.9), and ‘Jack in the Bilboes’(Figure 8.10)—does not even name the song (‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’), butmerely identifies with a line the scene the image depicts.William Ward’s superior mezzotint engravings after the same two Morland

paintings, published in 1790 and 1806 (Figures 8.11a and b), give merely a briefline in much smaller print (often trimmed from the image as it has been in theBritish Museum copy), as though the customers for these larger and more expensiveprints could readily have identified their musical source. Morland’s illustrations ofDibdin’s songs are discussed in greater depth by Nicholas Grindle in InterludeThree of this volume.

Figure 8.8. Charles Dibdin, ‘The Advantage of Toping’. London, 1807. Etching. Courtesyof the Trustees of the British Museum.




Figure 8.9. Robert Clamp after George Morland, The Contented Waterman. London,1797. Stipple etching. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 8.10. Robert Clamp after George Morland, Jack in the Bilboes. London, 1797.Stipple etching. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.



Figure 8.11. (a) William Ward after George Morland, The Contented Waterman. London,1806. Mezzotint. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. (b) William Ward afterGeorge Morland, Jack in the Bilboes. London, 1790. Mezzotint. Courtesy of The LewisWalpole Library, Yale University.




Dibdin clearly attached considerable importance to advertising and popularizinghis work. He used broadsides to announce his performances, apparently postingnew sheets for every appearance at the Sans Souci in the Strand in the autumn of1793, and he also advertised extensively in selected newspapers, placing noticesregularly, and with great frequency, in papers such as the True Briton, the Oracle,the Morning Post, and the Public Advertiser. The diversity of forms in whichindividual songs were published indicates that he and the booksellers who marketedhis songs (with or without his consent) grasped the significance of graphic materialin making the song sheets attractive and memorable. But the ‘Voyage to Margate’indicates that Dibdin did not regard images as supplementary to his songs, or asattractive decoration distinct from the processes of composition and performance.Dibdin’s song might have drawn on William Hinton’s prints of 1785 and 1786,but that relationship is given added depth by the publication, again by SamuelFores, of a print of the ‘Margate Hoy’ by Thomas Rowlandson which is basedclosely on Charles Catton’s image of the same title, and which first appeared on 12January 1795, less than a year before the first performance of Dibdin’s ChristmasGambols (Figure 8.12).Charles Catton Senior (1728–98) was a founding member of the Royal Academy,

best known for his work as a coach painter. He introduced a more naturalisticrepresentation of supporting animals to the heraldic devices that ornamented thevehicles of the landed elite. But he also produced a number of sketches in a stylestrikingly similar to that of Rowlandson, to whom some of his work has been

Figure 8.12. Thomas Rowlandson,Margate Hoy. London, 12 January 1795. Hand-colouredetching. Private collection.


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misattributed, and it seems likely that these influenced the developing style of theyounger caricaturist, possibly during his attendance at the Royal Academy schools.Rowlandson’s ‘Margate Hoy’ suggests a still closer relation, as it resembles Catton’searlier print so precisely that it looks like a reworking of the same plate. Rowland-son and Fores had made use of Catton’s image before, in a print of 4 August 1789titled ‘A Fresh Breeze’, which was a satirical reworking of the scene on board thehoy (Figure 8.13).Here Catton’s queasy passengers are replaced by the king and members of his

family and entourage as they voyage out to HMS Southampton, a thirty-two-gunfrigate loaned to them during their summer tour of the southwestern counties. Theprint alludes to newspaper stories that suggested that the royal family sometimesfound their sea trips ‘very unpleasant’.32 Presumably the cream of the jest—comparing the royal group with a crowd of East-Enders out on a spree—couldhave been relished only by an esoteric band of cognoscenti who had in theirportfolio of prints (or simply recollected) the image Rowlandson had adapted.But the sickness of the party would probably have indicated a vulgarity incongruouswith royal dignity even to those spectators who did not catch the Margate reference.

Figure 8.13. Thomas Rowlandson, A Fresh Breeze. London, 4 August 1789. Etching.Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

32 Whitehall Evening Post (14–16 July and 4–6 August 1789).




When Joseph Palmer published his tour of the Lake District in 1792, heprefaced it with a chapter titled ‘A slight touch of a Margate Hoy’. This turnedout to be a euphemistic allusion to the nauseous sufferings of the passengers, whichPalmer thought it witty to represent at some length. The English Review rebukedthe ‘coarse, vulgar daubing’ with which he depicted the scene, and he brought out asecond edition omitting the physical details the reviewer had found so offensive.33Seasickness in texts and perhaps also in images emphasized vulgar physicality, andneeded to be handled with care if it was to be a matter for humour rather thandisgust. Dibdin’s song draws on visual types that were well established in imagessuch as those of Cruikshank, Catton, and Rowlandson. But he is careful to avoidthe kinds of references to the physical symptoms of sickness that Palmer had toexcise from his humorous venture, and that might have found a visual parallel in theunpleasantly scatological ‘Sketch on Board a Margate Hoy’ which was producedand published by Piercy Roberts probably after 1795 (Figure 8.14). Roberts’ssketch shows a similar cast of characters to those depicted in the prints of Catton,Rowlandson, and Cruikshank, and given voices in Dibdin’s song, but it lacks

Figure 8.14. Piercy Roberts, A Sketch on board a Margate Hoy!! London, c.1795–1805.Hand-coloured etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

33 Joseph Palmer, A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes in Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland(London, 1792), 1; see also the second edition of 1795; English Review (January 1793): 52.

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any suggestion of the good nature or sympathy that made those representationshumorous.When Dibdin’s son Thomas included a song for a Margate Hoy-Man in

his pantomime Harlequin’s Tour, or The Dominion of Fancy, which was performedat Covent Garden in 1800, he chose to emphasize the holiday gaiety of the voyage,‘Crowding together all stations and quality’, and listed some of those aboard:

Bucks who hunt fashion like quick scented mousers,Leave town, it exhibits no sport for you now, sirs,So pull off your boots and then put on your trowsers,To join the gay throng, where the sea breezes blow.Pretty men-milliners, fresh water sailors,Smart prentices, alderman, actors and taylors,Let me and old ocean awhile be your jailors.34

Some narrowing of the social bandwidth to focus on city tradesmen is apparenthere, but the song omits any allusion to the seasickness that usually characterizedrepresentations of the hoy, perhaps because of the potential for vulgar humour thatit could arouse.Charles Dibdin’s song on the ‘Margate Hoy’ draws on well-established visual

types, and develops out of and draws on the tradition of caricature prints, as much astheatrical and textual sources. Caricatures in print-shop windows and on song sheetssuch as those produced by Fores and Laurie and Whittle spoke to the kind of wideaudience Dibdin was keen to address in print if not in person. Like Dibdin’s work,this print tradition displayed its characters in comic situations often involving somedegree of caricature. It was a humorous tradition that was, in Anthony Pasquin’sterms, vulgar and low, but it was not degrading or savagely satirical. It was a humouradapted to the articulation or representation of aspects of the lives and perhapssentiments of people who might otherwise not have been seen or heard.

34 [Thomas Dibdin], ‘Song (Margate Hoy-Man.)’, verse 2, in Songs, Chorusses, &c. in the NewPantomime of Harlequin’s Tour; or, The Dominion of Fancy. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal, CoventGarden (London, 1800), 9.




Interlude 3Dibdin and John Raphael Smith

Print Culture and Fine Art

Nicholas Grindle

The 1790s witnessed a minor boom in ‘posture’ prints of subjects taken from CharlesDibdin’s songs. Posture prints weremezzotintsmeasuring roughly 14! 10 inches andadvertised for sale in print-shop windows for 1s. uncoloured or 2s. coloured.1 In theearly 1790s, printmakers in the City of London issued cheerfully coloured pictures ofsubjects drawn from songs performed by Dibdin in his entertainments in the Lyceumtheatre: ‘The Greenwich Pensioner’, ‘The Lamplighter’, ‘MyPoll andmy Partner Joe’(Figure I3.1), ‘The Elopement’ (Figure I3.2), and ‘Poor Jack’.2 Such songs wouldconstitute amajor but feasible luxury for a skilled labourer such as a coachmanwith anincome of 15 to 20s. per week.3The images were accompanied by a few lines from the key verses and aimed to

reproduce the broad humour and vivid characterizations that made the songs sopopular. The prints remained popular, being reissued (as was common practice)and also appearing in other forms such as on earthenware.4 Dibdin had extensiveconnections to this world of print publishing, especially through his relationshipwith the publisher Samuel William Fores, as discussed by David O’Shaughnessy inChapter Four of this volume. Meanwhile, Harriet Guest’s essay in Chapter Eight ofthis volume shows that graphic humour such as that sold by Fores was both a sourceof material for Dibdin as well as a means of embellishing his own song sheets.

1 For ‘posture’ prints, see Sheila O’Connell, ‘Humorous, Historical and Miscellaneous: Mezzotints,One Shilling Plain, Two Shillings Coloured’, Publishing History 70/1 (2011): 83–100.

2 ‘Poor Jack’ was the subject of two posture prints in 1790, the first issued by Robert Sayer(BM 2010,7081.3129), the second by Carington Bowles II and Samuel Carver (BM 1935,0522.1.34).The other prints include: ‘My Poll and my Partner Joe’, Robert Sayer, 1790 (BM 1877,0113.162) andreissued by James Whittle and Richard Holmes Laurie, 1794 (National Maritime Museum PAF4034);‘The Greenwich Pensioner’, Carington Bowles after Robert Dighton, 1790–1 (BM 1935,0522.1.35);‘The Elopement’ (from The Watchman), J. Coard, 1795 (BM 2010,7081.993); and ‘The Lamplighter’,Carington Bowles after Robert Dighton, 1790 (BM 1935,0522.1.36).

3 For prices and wages, see O’Connell, ‘Humorous’, 88–9; Marcia Pointon, ‘Portrait Painting as aBusiness Enterprise in London in the 1780s’, Art History 7 (1984): 187–205.

4 Stella Beddoe, ‘Charles Dibdin and the Apotheosis of Jack Tar’, in Amanda Dunsmore (ed.), ThisBlessed Pot, This Earth: English Pottery Studies in Honour of Jonathan Horne (London: Paul HolbertonPublishing, 2011), 108–12.



Posture prints were produced in large numbers and for a relatively short time andso help to define the period, but this interlude will suggest that the more sophis-ticated and expensive prints after Dibdin’s songs are just as important in helping usgain a rounded understanding of his world. Attention to high-art representations of

Figure I3.1. ‘Poll and my Partner Joe’. London, 1794. Mezzotint, 36.7! 27 cm. Courtesyof the National Maritime Museum.

159Dibdin and John Raphael Smith



Dibdin’s songs is important for a number of reasons. It reminds us that subjectsfrom Dibdin’s work were popular with the higher echelons of late Georgian societyas well as with those in the City, and at the same time too. By looking at howDibdin’s subjects were adapted we can also see that his songs, as well as being thesubject of high art, were also transformed and parodied by the artists and the peoplewho bought the prints. Into this conversation piece we can insert Dibdin himselfand get a better sense of the people with whom he mixed and the context in which

Figure I3.2. Anon., The Elopement, London, 1795. Hand-coloured mezzotint, 35 ! 24.5cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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professional aspirations were sketched out and executed. In particular, I shall focuson three sets of prints after paintings by George Morland, published between 1789and 1791, to explore the workings of sociable behaviours and networks of profes-sional gentlemen. One set was a pair titled ‘The Contented Waterman’ and ‘Jack inthe Bilboes’, showing scenes taken from Dibdin’s song ‘My Poll and My PartnerJoe’ (see Figures 8.11 and 8.12 for illustrations). These engravings were precededby a set of six prints called Laetitia, which form a narrative to ‘represent the progressof a young female, from a state of innocence in the country, through successivescenes of depravity and distress, till she is at last received penitent by her parents’(see Figure I3.3).5Both sets were followed by The Deserter, a quartet of plates that appeared in

1791. Unlike the posture prints sold by City print-sellers, the mezzotint and stippleengravings done after Morland’s work were published from fashionable addresses inthe West End and ‘bought by distinguished connoisseurs’ at home and abroad.6They were also expensive: Laetitia cost £2 5s. for the set of six, uncoloured andunframed, and the Deserter £2 2s. for the set of four. In other words each set wasmore than twice the weekly income of the coachman who transported Laetitia andher officer away from her parents’ home in the dead of night.7Laetitia was based on designs painted by Morland for John Raphael Smith, a well-

connected printmaker who published a wide range of portraits and subject picturesafter leading artists, as well as many of his own compositions. The six prints are similarin format to a posture print but in stipple engraving rather than mezzotint, which hasthe same tonal range but a finer appearance, as can be seen by comparing Coard’smezzotint and Smith’s stipple engraving treatment of elopements (Figures I3.2 andI3.3, respectively), and are slightly larger. The story is a sentimentalized version of aglee-club song, ‘Beautiful Sally’, first published in 1787 by the art dealer WilliamCollins, who adapted it from Dibdin’s song ‘The High-Mettled Racer’, whichappeared in his entertainment Liberty Hall.8 The connections between Dibdin’ssong and Morland’s adaptation can be traced through the circulation of Collins’s‘Beautiful Sally’, which was performed at the Anacreontic Society (who also printed itin 1790), where professional musicians such as Charles Bannister rubbed shoulderswith amateur musicians such as John Raphael Smith. Bannister was a frequentperformer of Dibdin’s theatrical works in various venues, and gave the first perform-ance of ‘The High-Mettled Racer’ at Drury Lane in February 1785.9 Bannister and

5 George Dawe, The Life of George Morland, with Remarks on His Works (London, 1807), 63.6 Tim Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art,

1997), 274; see also O’Connell, ‘Humorous’, 92. Laetitia and The Deserter were published by JohnRaphael Smith in King Street, the main thoroughfare from Covent Garden to Leicester Fields. ‘TheContented Waterman’ and ‘Jack in the Bilboes’ were published by Philip Cornman just a stone’s throwto the west in Great Newport Street.

7 For prices, see Smith’s 1798 stock catalogue, reproduced in Ellen D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’:Prints by John Raphael Smith (1751–1812) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 259–64.

8 The ballad appeared in William Collins, The New Vocal Miscellany, or, a Fountain of PureHarmony (London, 1787), but compare D’Oench, who states that Collins’s claim to authorship is‘highly dubious’, ‘doubtful’, and ‘wholly false’: D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 125, 145.

9 Public Advertiser (4 February 1785); Fahrner, 111.




Figure I3.3. John Raphael Smith after George Morland, The Elopement, London, 1789.Stipple engraving, 47 ! 35.3 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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Smith frequently attended Anacreontic Society meetings, and would have knownbothDibdin’s song and Collins’s parody.10 Smith was at this timeMorland’s de factoemployer, and most likely suggested adapting ‘Beautiful Sally’, which Collins hadshown him in manuscript, to Morland, who may also have known it from Collinshimself, as the two had been acquaintances since the mid-1780s.11‘The Contented Waterman’ and ‘Jack in the Bilboes’ are paintings made by

Morland after Dibdin’s song ‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’, which he probably firstperformed on his ‘farewell tour’ in 1788.12 They were engraved as a pair ofextremely fine mezzotints by his brother-in-law (and Smith’s former pupil) WilliamWard. Given that a posture print by Robert Sayers of the same subject waspublished at the same time as Ward’s prints (1790), it is possible that the songalso featured as part of Dibdin’s contemporaneous entertainment The Oddities atthe Lyceum.Morland’s designs are much more sophisticated than Sayers’s mezzotint.Like Laetitia they have ambitions to be regarded as what Collins termed ‘the moreexalted style of composition . . . called historical painting’, an aspiration signified bythe representation of narrative through gesture and expression and also throughreferences to high art, especially Dutch painting and Thomas Gainsborough’scottage-door scenes.13 Moreover, ‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’ is a four-versesong. Sayers’s posture print, as well as Anne Dibdin’s own aquatint of the songreproduced in Volume Two of The Professional Life, represents the climax in whichthe waterman returns from the wars to find that Joe and Poll have taken uptogether. But the prints after Morland’s paintings only depict scenes from versesone and two. The genre of ‘contrast’ was popular for pictures featuring moralsubjects, and Morland had already worked on a number of well-received pairs inwhich industry is contrasted with idleness, or cruelty with sympathy. A ‘contrast’format may have been his way of instilling a measure of moral elevation into comicverse, and it also allowed him to demonstrate his mastery of contrasting passions ofcontentment and terror. At the same time the venture lacks Smith’s business acumen,since in refusing the sentimental appeal of Smith’s pictures and the cheerfulness withwhich Dibdin’s characters tend to bear their misfortunes, the pictures become lessmarketable. Dibdin himself may have recognized this when he revisited the press-gangtheme later in the 1790s to give it a happier ending.14 When ‘The ContentedWaterman’ was reissued in 1806 following Morland’s early death, the publisher didnot reissue its violent companion, ‘Jack in the Bilboes’.15The evidence points to Dibdin’s work being interpreted, and offered to a market

for sophisticated and expensive images, by a network of artists including Morland,Smith, Collins, and Ward. Dibdin and Smith were personally acquainted. Smith’s

10 Julia Frankau, An Eighteenth Century Artist and Engraver. John Raphael Smith: His Life and Works(London: Macmillan & Co., 1902), 14.

11 William Collins,Memoirs of a Picture: Containing the Adventures of Many Conspicuous Characters,3 vols (London, 1805), 2:2, 19, 179; see also Angelo, Reminiscences, 1:243–8.

12 Life, 2:250. For the prints, see Julia Frankau,WilliamWard ARA and James Ward RA: Their Livesand Works (London: Macmillan, 1904), 172–3 and 217–18.

13 Collins, Memoirs, 2:43. 14 Life, 3:57–9.15 See Frankau, William Ward, 172–3 and 217–18.




father was a successful painter, but Smith was apprenticed to a linen draper andmoved to London in 1767, having a shop in Exeter Change off the Strand. In the1820s Henry Angelo recalled, ‘It was during [Smith’s] residence there, that hebecame acquainted with Charles Dibdin, and having then some practical know-ledge of the arts, Dibdin [then at Drury Lane] advised him to sink the shop, andbecome a “professor and a gentleman”’.16 (By ‘professor’ he is most likely to havemeant one who professed an art both as a living and as a gentleman.) Dibdin andSmith’s acquaintance may still have been warm in 1789 when Dibdin gave his firstsolo entertainments in an auction-room in King Street, Covent Garden, the samestreet in which Smith had his shop, and where he showed paintings by Morlandand his prints after them.17 It is possible that Smith was one of the ‘friends’ whoencouraged Dibdin to persevere with solo performance and to begin publishing hisown work, a move Smith himself had taken in 1781, and which he followed with asolo exhibition in Norwich in 1784.18We can see from the case of Laetitia that the activities of clubs played a vital role

in mediating between song and print, as well as serving as a means by which singersand artists met one another. Smith was a member of the Anacreontic Society, a clubfor noblemen and professional singers that hosted semi-private concerts and met inthe Crown and Anchor tavern, just east of Smith’s shops in Exeter Change andExeter Court, which ‘contained one splendid room measuring no less than 84ft by35ft’ where a large company could meet.19 Dibdin himself composed many songs,and, as we have already seen, these were adapted and given new words by amateurssuch as Collins. While there is no evidence that Dibdin attended meetings of theAnacreontic Society, he circulated in the same milieu; his songs were well knownthere, and he performed at the same venue in 1807 at a Royal Academy birthdaydinner, where he ‘much pleased [the Academicians] with humorous songs’.20For his part Dibdin was an accomplished draughtsman, as testified by his

accomplished pen-and-wash landscape drawings in the contemporary picturesquestyle, such as his Church at Lyme Regis (see Figure I3.4).21 Henry Angelo’s com-ment that Dibdin had ‘some practical knowledge of the arts’ is borne out bythese drawings; he may have been a member of a sketching club such as the JackHarris tavern club, hosted by the West End frame-maker John Harris, whichSmith also attended.22 Shortly before The Professional Life appeared, Dibdinpublished his Observations on a Tour, ‘two large and handsome quarto volumes,embellished with forty views and twenty vignettes’. In the ‘Advertisement’ whichprefaced the volumes Dibdin exclaims, ‘Painting, which had been only my private

16 Angelo, Reminiscences, 2:241. 17 Life, 3:2.18 D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 150.19 E. Beresford Chancellor, Annals of the Strand (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912), 333; see also

Ian Newman’s blog on alehouses and political space (accessed 6 July 2015): http://www.1790salehouse.com. For Smith’s membership, see Frankau, John Raphael Smith, 17.

20 Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kathryn Cave, 16 vols (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1982), 8:3059, 5 June 1807.

21 e.g. BM 1876,0708.2372; BM 1876,0708.2373.22 Frankau, John Raphael Smith, 17, and Walter Thornbury, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, 2 vols

(1862, repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1:108.

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amusement, out of devotion to the public, I have in this instance made one of myprofessions.’23 In other words his profession of painting was a public extension ofhis private character. Amateur drawing, as contemporary guides pointed out, wasthe exemplary private medium, and it was in the context of sketching clubs and thetaking of a picturesque tour that the profession of an art agreed with the privatestatus of a gentleman, something that Dibdin was no doubt eager to advertise. Butthe associations may reach further than that. Dibdin’s views and vignettes conformin every way to the prescriptions laid down in manuals such as Rudolph Ack-ermann’s Lessons for Beginners in the Fine Arts (1796). Ackermann was proprietor ofa large shop called ‘The Repository of Arts’ at 101 Strand, opposite the Lyceum anda few yards west of the Royal Academy’s home in Somerset House.24 Like Dibdin’sown shop and theatre in Leicester Place, and Smith’s shop and gallery in KingStreet, the Repository disguised its commercial functions in the garb of privateleisure through the addition of a drawing school, a library, and (by 1801) a smallgallery.25 Aquatint, the method used by Anne Dibdin to turn her father’s tinted

Figure I3.4. Charles Dibdin, Church at Lyme Regis, n.d. Brush drawing in grey wash onpaper, 27.1 ! 40.4 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

23 Observations.24 For more on Ackermann’s ‘Repository’, see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the

Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000),127–43.

25 These parallels may have resonated in 1811 when Ackermann reissued Smith’s Laetitia in a newseries.




drawings into print (see Figure I3.5), was the same method used by Ackermann andother publishers of ‘progressive’ drawing manuals to demonstrate the process ofcomposing a landscape drawing.26 Publishing the aquatints in Observations on aTour helped align the character of Dibdin’s shop and theatre with the kind of venturepromoted so successfully by Ackermann. It also formed part of Dibdin’s broader andmore long-standing claim to be a professional but leisured man of letters modelled byfigures such as Charles Burney, as discussed in Chapter One of this volume.For Dibdin and Smith clubs were an important medium for professional and

social affiliation. For models of professional success they had David Garrick andSir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy, with whom they had,respectively, close working relationships. While it is difficult to know how club-bable Dibdin really was—The Professional Life says little about informal friendships,and he is quick to distinguish his own conduct from the masculine world ofdrinking, rural sports, and glees that inform his songs—we should note that maleconviviality took a wide range of forms, and Burney, Garrick, and Reynolds’s‘Club’, and indeed the Royal Academy itself, had as good a claim as any to embodythe ideal of sober male companionship adumbrated by Joseph Addison in theSpectator.27 Dibdin’s self-fashioning as a gentleman-professor of picturesque

Figure I3.5. Anne Dibdin after Charles Dibdin, ‘Approach to Langholm’, London, 1801.Aquatint. From Observations. © The British Library Board, 190.c.4–5 vol. 1, facingpage 326

26 Bermingham, Learning, 165–7.27 Life, 1:8. For a more detailed discussion of Dibdin’s alignment with the Spectator, see Chapter Four

of this volume.

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scenery speaks to the explicitly clubbable male world of the Georgian theatrerevealed in The Professional Life, but also to the more conspicuously femalecharacter of the leisured classes at the turn of the century. If, as Ann Berminghamhas suggested, these two spheres competed for cultural authority around 1800,28we should also note that neither would question the broad truth of Dibdin’sassumption that the summit of professional achievement was to be known as a‘professor and a gentleman’.In this context, it is unsurprising that art had high ambitions. Different attempts

were made in the eighteenth century to show how art could make people virtuous,and sociability was a key feature in most theories.29 Clubs and commerce served asa means to transcend local associations and personal interest through cultivation ofprivate character, which is precisely what art in its highest eighteenth-century form,the painting of exemplary virtue, also claimed to do. Given this association ofprivate character and professional ambition, we should not be surprised if a glimpseof private life sheds new light on the structure and ambitions of professionalactivity, as suggested by Dibdin’s advice to Smith to become ‘a professor and agentleman’. Dibdin’s shop in Leicester Place had the same refined character asSmith’s shop in King Street. In fact the situation of their shops, performances,exhibitions, and clubs along the principal thoroughfares of the West End—theStrand, King Street, Leicester Square—helps us see that claims to gentlemanlyand professional status were facilitated by local contacts, but at the same time hadto divest themselves of any local character. In this context, Dibdin’s exasperated‘I grew most intolerably sick of a traffic with music-shops’may be more than simplya metaphor, since it reveals a concern that the very topography of London and thesinews of its commerce was antithetical to the private character of a professor andgentleman, a combination whose best spatial analogy is the picturesque tour.30

28 Bermingham, Learning, 127 ff.29 See especially Andrew Hemingway, ‘The “Sociology” of Taste in the Scottish Enlightenment’,

Oxford Art Journal 12/2 (1989): 3–35, and David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and thePublic Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

30 Life, 3:8.




PART III

NINETEENTH-CENTURYTRANSITIONS



9The Changing Theatrical Economy

Charles Dibdin the Younger atSadler’s Wells, 1814–19

Susan Valladares

Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin (Charles the Younger) managed and wrote forSadler’s Wells Theatre between 1800 and 1819. He was the eldest son of CharlesDibdin and Harriet Pitt, an actress. His brother, Thomas Dibdin, would also makea name for himself as an actor, playwright, and manager, as discussed by Jim Davisin Chapter Ten of this volume. In the early nineteenth century, frequent compari-sons were made between the careers of Charles Dibdin the Elder and his two sons,who, despite enjoying professional successes in their own right, were generallycompared to their father at a disadvantage (their illegitimacy—as children born outof wedlock—being seemingly reflected in their perceived failure to match hisachievements).This chapter focuses on Charles the Younger’s final years as manager of Sadler’s

Wells—a remote venue known as ‘the country theatre’, whose location in Islingtonmeant that there was ‘scarcely a House’ nearby until the late 1810s.1 But Sadler’sWells was also one of London’s oldest and most successful minor theatres. Charlesthe Younger was its manager for nineteen years and six months but left reluctantlythereafter, bitterly reflecting that although the theatre had been his ‘pet child’, ‘petchildren do not always turn out the most filially affectionate’ (Memoirs, 125). Byexamining the possible reasons for his withdrawal, this chapter begins to identifythe pressures attendant upon the theatrical economy during the early decades of thenineteenth century. It focuses on the range of topical entertainments presented atSadler’s Wells between the proclamation of peace on 20 June 1814 (the dateCharles the Younger singles out in his Memoirs as marking the beginning of histheatre’s decline) and 12 April 1819 (the start of his final season as manager). Fromthis opening consideration of the generically heterogeneous performances atSadler’s Wells, the chapter then turns to Charles the Younger’s Young Arthur; or,The Child of Mystery: A Metrical Romance (1819), which it reads as another index

1 Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger, ed. George Speaight(London: Society for Theatre Research, 1956), 41. The Memoirs were composed in 1830 but firstpublished (in this abridged form) in 1956. Further references are given after quotations in the text.



of the changes to the cultural economy of the early nineteenth century. Thischapter thus aims to add its own inflections to the political, aesthetic, and com-mercial questions raised by other contributors to this volume, and implicitly toprovide a longer chronological perspective from which to view the career of CharlesDibdin the Elder.

SADLER ’S WELLS POSTWAR

Charles the Younger took up management of Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1800. Twoyears later he and Thomas Dibdin became shareholders (his brother investing£1,400 in the purchase of a quarter-share).2 In 1804 a water tank sourced fromthe nearby New River was installed on stage, and another smaller tank placedwithin the roof, to enable waterfall effects. The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) was the firstproduction to benefit from these innovations. This nationalist entertainment,complete with ships built to scale by shipwrights from the Woolwich dockyardand the engagement of young boy actors to sustain the illusion of distance,represented such a departure from usual staging practices that Charles the Youngerconfidently described his ‘coup d’oeil’ as a spectacular ‘coup de theatre’ (Memoirs, 62).Charles the Younger was here building upon the ‘innovative, varied, entertaining’programme that Michael Burden, in tracing Charles the Elder’s fortunes at theRoyal Circus, has defined as foundational to the success of the minor theatres.3 Butwhereas Charles the Elder would be most readily remembered for his sea songs,Charles the Younger would win renown for his staging of sea battles: thanks to itswater tanks, Sadler’s Wells became adept at reproducing, in the words of JaneMoody, ‘an aquatic theatre of war’ that enticed audiences from all parts of the city.4In the years after the Napoleonic Wars, Sadler’s Wells was, however, a theatre in

decline. Postwar economic and social distress reduced the demand for theatregoingmore generally, while the establishment of new London theatres, such as theCoburg, which opened on 11 May 1818, made the situation even worse. Thefierce competition between the old and new minor theatres put direct pressure, forinstance, on Thomas Dibdin’s management of the Surrey.5 At Sadler’s Wells, thesituation was further complicated by a series of internal problems. By the late1810s, audiences had become over-familiar with the effects of the main water tank;contractual disputes resulted in the absence of the hitherto regular performerJoseph Grimaldi—the celebrated Clown of English pantomime—for the entire1817–18 season; while changes to the theatre’s managerial hierarchy fosteredfeelings of resentment and alienation. It is interesting, therefore, that in hisMemoirs, Charles the Younger should have allowed so much to rest upon his beliefthat ‘theatres (in London, at least) prosper most during War’. ‘It is a fact’, he

2 John Russell Stephens, ‘Dibdin, Thomas John (1771–1841)’, ODNB (accessed 4 April2015), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7589?docPos=2.

3 Chapter Three of this volume. 4 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 28.5 Stephens, ‘Dibdin, Thomas John’.

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laments, ‘that immediately previous to the short Peace of Amiens, Sadler’s Wellswas crowded every night; but as soon as the Peace was announced, our receiptssuddenly fell off to a very serious degree, and continued in that reduced state, tillthe war recommenced, and then they recovered their former amount’ (Memoirs, 119).Although he goes on to concede that ‘many reasons have been given for suchoccurrences’, his analysis ends here, lest it fail to appear ‘thoroughly intelligible toothers’, and because he remains uncertain as to ‘whether or no it is worth enquiringinto at all’ (119). While Charles the Younger identifies a sharp decline in profitsduring the fourteen months that marked the Peace of Amiens, he describes,significantly, only a gradual decline in theatrical fortunes following Napoleon’sabdication (119).Indeed, the years 1814 to 1817 were far from complete failures: Sadler’s Wells

still made a profit and several new entertainments attracted public notice. Theseincluded Charles the Younger’s aquatic dramas The Two Caliphs; or, The Genii ofthe Waters (11 April 1814) and The Corsair (18 July 1814). The latter boastedespecially impressive scenic effects; its finale re-enacting ‘a conflagration’ of theCastle of Seyd that, being reflected upon the water, ‘made the whole Stage appear asif it were on fire’ (Memoirs, 109).6 Based on Byron’s bestselling poem, Charles theYounger’s The Corsair partook of what would become an especially voguish trendin the late 1810s and 1820s—the adaptation of popular poems and novels for thestage. Byron’s oriental poem had been an immediate bestseller and would, in fact,prove to be one of the most successful individual long poems of the Romanticperiod (enjoying sales of an estimated 25,000 copies; whereas, by comparison,Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt (1812) sold approximately 13,750 copies).7Adaptations would also characterize the repertoire at the Adelphi (formerly SansPareil) Theatre, which responded to popular demand for ‘The Great Unknown’with Ivanhoe; or, The Saxon Chief (27 January 1820) and Kenilworth (8 February1821), and at the Royal Circus, where Thomas Dibdin produced stage versions ofWalter Scott’s Montrose and The Bride of Lammermoor less than a fortnight aftertheir publication.8These stage adaptations tended to be only loosely based upon the original

literary texts; The Corsair was no exception, with Charles the Younger’s desire toplay to the strengths of his company and provide a more arresting finale resultingin significant deviations from his source narrative. His 1817 production of TheGheber; or, The Fire Worshippers took similar liberties with Thomas Moore’sLallah Rookh, another bestseller. Orientalism was by then a recognizable featureof the dramatic repertoire, both patent and minor. As Daniel O’Quinn hasconvincingly argued, eighteenth-century representations of Islamic society on

6 Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, Songs, &c with a Description of the Scenery in the New Aqua-Dramacalled ‘The Corsair’ (London, 1814), 24.

7 These figures, as cited by William St Clair, exclude ‘collected editions, imports and piracies’.William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004), 218.

8 William Knight, A Major London Minor: The Surrey Theatre 1805–1865 (London: Society forTheatre Research, 1997), 24.




the London stages tended to be strongly politicized—a means, especially, oftesting ‘the limits of monarchical power’.9 Within this context, O’Quinn de-scribes Charles Dibdin the Elder’s and Edward Thompson’s The Seraglio (CoventGarden, 1776) as a play ‘obsessed with the space of the harem first as a site ofsexual fantasy and second as a symptom of political lassitude’.10 Claire Mabilat’sdistinction between exoticism as ‘an artistic tool’ and orientalism as a conceptcharged with defined ‘cultural and/or political agendas’ is thus particularlyuseful.11 At Sadler’s Wells, exoticism and orientalism tended to be equallypresent in entertainments that had clearly been written to capitalize upon thetheatre’s capacity for impressive stage effects, but that also sought to go beyondthe spectacular by tapping into the public’s wider curiosity for Eastern customsand politics.

THE EXOTICIZED CITY

At Sadler’s Wells, so pronounced was the demand for spectacular effect that thetheatre’s main scene painters, Luke Clint and Robert Andrews, struggled to keep up.In 1814 they were joined by John Henderson Grieve, who also worked as ascene painter for Covent Garden.12 Both pantomimes of the 1815–16 season—Mermaid; or, Harlequin Pearl Diver (27 March 1815) and Harlequin Brilliant; or,The Clown’s Capers (3 July 1815)—and the revived aqua-drama of Kaloc; or, TheSlave Pirate (first staged in 1813) called for impressive backdrops. Indeed, socomplex were the scene changes for Harlequin Brilliant that Charles the Youngerinserted two songs between scenes thirteen and fourteen in order to buy time forthe technicians to realize the elaborate transformation of the ‘Pavilion at Brighton’to a scene set ‘on real water’ depicting the launch of HMS Britannia from a Britishdockyard.13 The fact that this was not even the pantomime’s concluding scene is allthe more significant in light of David Mayer’s salient reminder that at Sadler’sWells special effects tended to be reserved for the grand finale.14 While othertheatres, such as Drury Lane, necessarily compensated for the absence of a strongClown by investing heavily in scenic effect, Grimaldi’s regular engagement atSadler’s Wells meant that its pantomimes could privilege the harlequinade’s char-acteristic chase and pursuit. But by 1815 spectacle was such an integral part of thetheatrical experience that not even the pantomimes at Sadler’s Wells dared tominimize it. Not all audience members of the minor theatres were fully literate,

9 Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Theatre, Islam, and the Question of Monarchy’, in Swindells and Taylor,Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 638–54, 639.

10 O’Quinn, ‘Theatre’, 646.11 Claire Mabilat,Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Nineteenth-Century British Popular

Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 7.12 Sybil Rosenfeld, ‘A Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’, Theatre Notebook 15/2 (1960–1): 57–62, 59.13 Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, Songs, &c in the Pantomime called ‘Harlequin Brilliant; or, The

Clown’s Capers’ (London, 1815), 8–9.14 David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1969), 35.

Susan Valladares174



but the entertainments on offer catered to degrees of visual and musical literacy thatoffered important compensation for this.A surviving scene book, detailing the various set designs that Andrews, Grieve,

and Clint produced for Sadler’s Wells, testifies to a commitment to scenic noveltyacross the genres.15 The book includes seven scenes from the melodramaIwanowna; or, The Maid of Moscow (13 May 1815), which required the collaborationof the three principal artists for the recreation of extravagant indoor and outdoorspaces. In preparation for the finale Andrews constructed ‘A Setting Scene. Trans-parent Back’d Working Roller Behind Burning Moscow’ (no.34) whose effectsCharles the Younger would recall as nothing short of ‘electrical’ (Memoirs, 116).The play then concluded in a ‘superb hall’ (no.41), also prominently advertised in theplaybills. The scene book’s inclusion of only a partial sketch of the hall suggests thatthis final scene alone consisted of various intricately linked parts.The Sadler’s Wells scene book captures what Shearer West describes as ‘a

changing professional art world . . . that saw the evolution of painting from tradeto a liberal art, while scientific advances provided opportunities for new experi-mentation with scenic effect’.16 It also helps us identify specific geographies ofproduction and reception since, intriguingly, some of the designs for the theatre’smost elaborate pantomimes imply an interest in redirecting the gaze from scenesof foreign splendour to the capital’s more familiar topography. The pantomimeMermaid, for instance, included a panoramic view of the New River Reservoir andSadler’s Wells itself as a main scene.17 The following season’s Easter pantomimeLondon and Paris; or, Harlequin Traveller (15 April 1816) took this even further bycontrasting in ‘alternation, the most attractive and popular scenes, and views, in eachof these cities, and in their respective environs’, as Charles the Younger proudlyoutlines in his Memoirs (116).As the Continent reopened for travel, verisimilitude rose high on the artistic

agenda. Stuart Semmel details how, in the aftermath of Waterloo, ‘thousands ofBritons found themselves confronted with material vestiges of Napoleon’s fallenempire. They encountered portable momentos [sic]: teeth, bullets, the carriage ofBonaparte himself ’18—in short, miscellaneous relics of war that were sourced inBelgium and subsequently showcased in English private homes and public spaces,such as the Egyptian Hall (where Napoleon’s carriage went on display in the firstweek of January 1816), theWaterlooMuseum in PallMall, and the nearbyWaterlooExhibition and Waterloo Rooms.19 The entertainments at Sadler’s Wells at onceregistered and reacted against these different kinds of postwar spectacle. After 1815,

15 See ‘Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’, The Garrick Club, London. The book was bought at the sale ofLouis Haghes’s Library and Engravings on 7 August 1885 (Lot 48).

16 Shearer West, ‘Manufacturing Spectacle’, in Swindells and Taylor, Handbook of the GeorgianTheatre, 286–303, 288.

17 Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, Songs, and other Vocal Compositions in the Pantomime called‘Mermaid; or, Harlequin Pearl Diver!’ (London, 1815), ‘Scenery’.

18 Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory afterWaterloo’, Representations 69 (2000): 9–37, 9.

19 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 239–40.




Charles the Younger and his team of artists would have been fully aware thataudiences not only sought pleasure from, but actively scrutinized, the scenic trans-formations enacted by Harlequin’s magic sword or bat. In the Sadler’s Wells scenebook, the use of paper flaps (as illustrated in Figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3) permittedindividual scenes from London and Paris to be superimposed by as many as two orthree others. It provides a compelling record of the harlequinade’s movementbetween parallel sites in Paris and London, such as the Hôtel des Invalides, ChelseaHospital, and Greenwich (no.25; Figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3), or the Hôtel desMonnaies and Bank of England (no.26).By the 1820s, pantomimes would rely ever more heavily on the three-

dimensional scenic model provided by the diorama. As Mayer explains, thisaimed in large part to compensate for the decline of the harlequinade followingGrimaldi’s reduced appearances on stage, as a result of his deteriorating health, andofficial retirement in 1823.20 What is interesting about a pantomime such asLondon and Paris is that it suggests that in the 1810s tentative moves were alreadybeing made towards the kind of scenic narrative embodied by the diorama—even atSadler’s Wells, during a period when it was still known as Grimaldi’s ‘home’.

Figure 9.1. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomimeLondon and Paris (London, 1816), depicting Hôtel des Invalides. Pen and watercolour.From ‘Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’. Courtesy of The Garrick Club, London.

20 Mayer, Harlequin, 3.

Susan Valladares176



London and Paris suggests, furthermore, that while representations of Paris clearlyconstituted a principal attraction for postwar audiences, the English capital wasrecognized as an ‘exotic’ site in its own right. The pantomime depended, after all,upon scenes presented in alternation, rather than consecutive sequences focused onany one locale. This structuring lends weight to what James Chandler and KevinGilmartin have called the phenomenon of the ‘eidometropolis’, borrowing the titleof Thomas Girton’s 1802 pictorial representation of London to describe how theRomantic city became a form of panoramic spectacle.21The exoticization of London included, significantly, an interest in the minor

theatres’ specific localization within it. This was neatly exemplified by the compet-ing responses to the first London performances of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.As Moyra Haslett notes, in early 1818 ‘the [Don Juan] legend’s monopoly of thetheatres was complete’ with ‘six different productions playing simultaneously in thecapital’.22 These included the Royal Circus’s burlesque, Don Giovanni; or,

Figure 9.2. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomimeLondon and Paris (London, 1816), depicting Chelsea Hospital. Pen and watercolour. From‘Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’. Courtesy of The Garrick Club, London.

21 James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, ‘Introduction’, in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin(eds), The Romantic Metropolis, The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–41, 8.

22 Moyra Haslett, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and the Don Juan Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997), 142.




A Spectacle on Horseback! (26 May 1817), which enjoyed more than one hundredperformances,23 and the Olympic Theatre’s Don Giovanni in London, which hadpremiered on 26 December 1817. The latter exploited advances in lightingtechniques that promised not only visually impressive but also satirically incisiverepresentations of an assemblage of places within the capital. These were listed onthe playbills as ‘St Giles’s (by gas light)’, ‘Westminster Hall (in a new light)’,‘Interior of the King’s Bench (in its true light)’, ‘Exterior of the Insolvent Court(by sky light)’, ‘Charing Cross (by a blue light)’, and Drury Lane’s ‘Grand Saloon(by a fan light)’.24 Meanwhile, the Royal Circus’s playbills stated that ThomasDibdin’s production of Don Giovanni would include scenes in or near Seville butalso ‘(by way of a Pictorial Episode) a fine scene of Blackfriars Bridge taken in theCircus’.25 In the earlier pantomime of The Dog and Duck; or, Harlequin in theObelisk (1816) the Circus had already presented a variety of new London scenes,including a ‘View from the Obelisk, looking towards the Surrey Theatre’ and the‘Interior of the Royal Circus’.26 This fascination for the sites of London attests to amodern understanding of the metropolis as ‘at once capital to the provinces and

Figure 9.3. Robert C. Andrews, trick scene on flaps for the Sadler’s Wells pantomimeLondon and Paris (London, 1816), depicting Greenwich. Pen and watercolour. From‘Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’. Courtesy of The Garrick Club, London.

23 Knight, A Major London Minor, 24. 24 Olympic Theatre Playbill (26 January 1818).25 Royal Circus Playbill (14 May 1817). 26 Royal Circus Playbill (9 September 1816).

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point of contact with the wider world’ that was enhanced by the minor theatres’self-reflexive strategy of specifically locating themselves within the cityscape.27In December 1821 the Coburg would take such autoethnography to its extreme

by installing a much-advertised ‘looking glass’: a ‘mirror curtain’, consisting of sixty-three glass panels, by which audiences could see their own reflections on stage.28This innovation, although dismissed by some reviewers as nothing more than ‘agewgaw’, proved decisive in drawing in the crowds.29 In her analysis of the ways inwhich the minor theatres worked to ‘construe a new cultural metropolis’, Moodyargues that the mirror curtain’s resemblance to the plate-glass windows found incontemporary shopping arcades marked ‘a significant step in the transformation ofthe dramatic spectator into the self-conscious purchaser of cultural goods and visualpleasures’.30 I would like to underline Moody’s stress on ‘transformation’, not leastbecause the spectacle offered at the Coburg was, in fact, curiously discontinuous.According to contemporary commentators, not only were the curtain’s individ-

ual plates quite dull, but ‘owing to the numerous divisions in the glass, the wholecontour of the scene [was] broken and disjointed’.31 In the 1835 series ‘LondonLetters to Country Cousins’ (published in The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée)the curtain thus serves as a metaphor for the creative memory:

[T]he whole formed, not a mirror, but a multiplication table . . . putting the head ofone person upon the shoulders of another—transferring the plumed bonnet of a thirdto the bald pate of her next male neighbour—lifting the dirty apprentice out of theback row of the pit into the dress circle—and, in fact, confounding objects, looks, andlocalities, in a manner amusing enough to the beholder, much more so perhaps, than ifit had presented a perfect picture of the scene before it.32

In keeping with the letter’s light-hearted tone, these incongruous images areinitially characterized by nothing more than slapstick comedy; but they soonacquire patently political implications, as highlighted by the imaginative transposalof the ‘dirty apprentice’ across the socially-tiered auditorium. It is significant that bythe time of the letter’s publication, the Coburg’s mirror curtain had been pulleddown (in recognition of the safety issues associated with its sheer weight). Theletter’s nostalgic tone nevertheless provides a valuable reminder that while themirrorcurtain did indeed attract bad press, audiences at large seem to have beenmuchmoregenerous in their responses. As memorialized by the letter’s fictive author ‘TerenceTempleton’, the mirror curtain provided an effective act drop precisely because of its

27 Chandler and Gilmartin, ‘Introduction’, 1.28 N. M. Bligh, ‘Mirror Curtains’, Theatre Notebook 15/2 (1960–1): 56. Although Bligh dates the

curtain to 1822, it was already on display (albeit not fully complete) by December 1821. On theatricalautoethnography, see Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London 1770–1800(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 11 and Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

29 Drama; Or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine 2/3 (1822): 154; and The Times 11439 (27 December1821): 2.

30 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 148; 154. 31 The Times (27 December 1821).32 ‘London Letters to Country Cousins. – No. 1’, Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée 7

(July 1835): 4.




flaws. Failing to deliver ‘a perfect picture’, the curtain’s discordant reflectionsprompted theatregoers to engage in exercises of self-identification and reinventionthat ranged from the playful to the ambitious, and which, by extension, mayultimately have encouraged the Coburg’s patrons to recognize and assume theirown agency in an ever more aggressive capitalist economy.

POLITICS

The symbolic advantages of placing the minor theatres at the heart of the metro-politan experience were, therefore, not only aesthetic and commercial, but alsopointedly political. As E. P. Thompson notes, radicalism in the capital ‘assumedmore conscious, organized, and sophisticated forms’ after 1815.33 The district ofIslington, moreover, was well known for its strong radical sympathies—a factCharles the Younger had to negotiate with care when devising new entertainmentsfor Sadler’s Wells.34 In her discussion of Jane Scott’s postwar productions at theSans Pareil, Jacky Bratton concedes that ‘there can be, of course, no possibility thatthe authorities would have overlooked any overtly political play staged in London atthis time’; nevertheless, as she concludes, that is not to say that political meaningscould not be ‘adduced’.35The pantomimes for which Sadler’s Wells enjoyed such high renown may have

offered only passing references to the political issues of the day, but the ever moreimpressive stage effects that made the city at once familiar and strange encouragedaudiences to align their seasonal favourites with the orientalist entertainments thatalready enjoyed a long association with critiques of governance. By enhancing theharlequinade through visual effects, the artistic team at Sadler’s Wells helped realizethe potential for what Mayer refers to as the ‘retributive comedy’ inherent in thatpart of the pantomime’s action.36 The harlequinade, which sees the lovers attemptto escape from authority, constitutes the all-important second half of the panto-mime. This follows the ‘transformation scene’, in which a benevolent agenttransforms the principal characters of the opening fable into the comic types ofHarlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Clown.37 The subsequent action is fast-paced and spectacular, Harlequin’s magic bat giving him the power to confuse hisadversaries by realizing a metamorphosis of the scenes and objects they encounterduring their journey. In the pantomime Harlequin’s Vision; or, The Feast of theStatue (Drury Lane, 26 December 1817) this included ‘the transformation of achest into a sofa, on which the Clown seats himself, and which is immediatelyafterwards converted into a kitchen-grate, with a fire briskly burning in it, and

33 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1963; 1970), 662.34 Ibid., 669.35 Jacky Bratton, ‘Jane Scott the writer-manager’, in Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (eds),

Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), 77–98, 89.

36 Mayer, Harlequin, 52.37 For a good description of the basic structure of pantomimes, see ibid., 23–31.

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which gives the Clown an unpleasing hint, a posteriori’.38 ‘Lissom as a cane, andfurnishing all that little supply of conscious power which a nervous mind requires,and which is the secret of all button-pulling, switch-carrying, seal-twirling andglove-twirling’, Leigh Hunt insisted that Harlequin’s magic sword was perfect forthe delivery of ‘satirical strokes’. ‘We always think, when we see it,’ he continued,‘what precious thumps we should like to give some persons,—that is to say,provided we could forget our own infirmities for the occasion.’39 Although Charlesthe Younger’s greatest successes in the years 1800 to 1815 could broadly bedescribed as ‘patriotic’ entertainments that celebrated the heroism of Britishsoldiers and sailors, Harlequin’s silent but energetic stage presence was, byHunt’s colourful description, exceptionally enabling, allowing audiences to imagine‘what supplement they please to the mute caricature before them’.40 While I do notwant to claim that the pantomimes staged at Sadler’s Wells were, in themselves, ofan oppositional, much less a ‘radical’ nature, I do want to suggest that Charles theYounger might, like his father, be best understood as an ‘independent loyalist’, toborrow the term defined by David Kennerley in Chapter Five of this volume.The desire at once to mobilize but also to nuance loyalist opinion (as described in

more detail below, with reference to Young Arthur) was fraught with challenges.Spikes in unemployment, crime, and vagrancy rates, combined with industrialdepression and poor harvests, meant that in the autumn of 1816 conditions inLondon were ripe for the Spa Field Riots. Although the riots concluded in some-thing of an anticlimax that demonstrated the lack of coherence within the radicalmovement and ultimately helped middle-class reformers cement a distinctionbetween radical and moderate sympathies,41 even this was not enough to forestalla government clampdown. In line with the repressive measures enforced in the1790s, Habeas Corpus was suspended on 1 July 1817 and the Seditious MeetingsAct reinstated. The minor theatres had survived the surveillance culture of the lateeighteenth century and would do so again; but managers would need to exercisestringent assessments of the kinds of performance on offer.During the Napoleonic Wars topicality had been at the top of Charles the

Younger’s agenda. In 1813, for example, he produced ‘two military and musicalmélanges’ (Memoirs, 107) in celebration of the success enjoyed by British arms inthe Iberian Peninsula: Vittoria; or, Wellington’s Laurels and The Battle of Salamanca.This preference for military entertainments continued in the postwar years, asexemplified by the already mentioned Russian-themed melodrama Iwanowna andthe musical piece Forget-me-not; or, The Flower of Waterloo (1817). Interestingly,although both these entertainments were already relatively dated by the time oftheir premiere, their very ‘belatedness’ seems to have carried emotive charge; the‘extremely pleasing’ qualities of Forget-me-not, for instance, were explicitly linked to

38 Theatrical Inquisitor (January 1818): 51, as quoted in Steven E. Jones, Satire and Romanticism(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 176.

39 Leigh Hunt, Examiner (26 January 1817). 40 Ibid.41 Thompson, English Working Class, 696.




its ‘various popular old airs’.42 By 1817 the recourse to familiar tunes was a triedand tested practice for Charles the Younger, who frequently set new songs toexisting music or mixed well-known lyrics with his own. As Mark Philp suggests,this could help encourage identification with new causes, framing musical perform-ances as ‘multi-layered processes of ideological contestation and confrontation’.43Charles the Younger’s decision to extend his wartime repertoire past 1815 maytherefore also be indicative of a belief that the war’s heroes had yet to be satisfac-torily rewarded.

INTERNAL STRIFE

The start of the 1817–18 season at Sadler’s Wells also entailed practical challengesrelated to theatrical personnel and machinery. Although the British Stage eagerlyawaited the theatre’s reopening, confident that Sadler’s Wells’ advantageous vicin-ity to the New River and Grimaldi’s popularity as the ‘prince of Clowns’ werevirtual guarantors of success, 1817 would be remembered as one of the theatre’sworst years on record.44 Charles the Younger painfully observed that ‘we wound upour accounts minus’ for the first time since 1800 (Memoirs, 121)—in no small partbecause this was ‘the only Season the Theatre opened without [Grimaldi]’ (119).45It took time for Grimaldi’s replacement, ‘Signor Paulo’ (the stage name of PauloRedigé the Younger), to win over the crowds.46 Many of the pantomime songs weresuited to Grimaldi alone: Charles the Younger explains that ‘when writing them,I had in view much more his peculiarities of what I may call, expression, than anyliterary fame’ (113). As Jim Davis shows in Chapter Ten of this volume, thiscollaborative method of authorship and dramatic production was an approachalso pursued by Charles the Younger’s brother, Thomas, and numerous otherdramatists in this period. As a result, therefore, of the absence of Grimaldi fromthe Sadler’s Wells company, the pantomimes in which Paulo featured were evenmore reliant on special effects. Evidence of this takes tangible form in the playbillsadvertising Sadler’s Wells’ 1817 pantomime, April Fools! Or, Months and Mum-mery, which included a scene-by-scene full ‘Prospectus of the Pantomime’ overleaf.Yet by 1817 Sadler’s Wells’ spectacular repertoire was beginning to feel decidedly

tired. Even the water tanks had lost their novelty. As Charles the Younger explained:

42 British Stage and Literary Cabinet (August 1817): 183.43 Philp, Reforming Ideas, 256.44 British Stage and Literary Cabinet (April 1817): 83.45 In 1815 William Hazlitt responded to false rumours of Grimaldi’s death by comparing this

possibility to Napoleon’s second exile: ‘As without the gentleman at St. Helena, there is an end ofpolitics in Europe; so, without the clown at Sadler’s Wells, there must be an end of pantomimes in thiscountry!’ Examiner (31 December 1815). This was an audacious if humorous claim which, as JamesMulvihill underlines, acknowledges ‘the extent to which theatre and public life were co-opting eachother’. James Mulvihill, ‘William Hazlitt on Dramatic Text and Performance’, Studies in EnglishLiterature, 1500–1900 41/4 (2001: ‘The Nineteenth Century’): 695–709, 707.

46 Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary of Actors, 2:237–9.

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The body of water had become not only familiar, but caviare, from the familiarity; inaddition to which, the public had become in a great degree, conversant with the modesand mediums in and through which we effected our aquatic surprises, and hence theyexcited neither astonishment, nor delight; again, I had exhausted all my inventivefancy, as regarded producing novelties, in the water Scene; and every artist in theTheatre had exhausted his[.] (Memoirs, 120–21)

Not even promises of ‘ample remuneration’ proved sufficient to excite new ideasfor the water tanks’ use, while John Astley’s investment in a reservoir for hisAmphitheatre meant that their very uniqueness was under threat, as Charles theYounger confided in a letter to Lloyd Baker dated 22 December 1817.47 Waterspectacles would continue to define the theatre’s repertoire in the 1820s, butthe final years of Charles the Younger’s management were marked, as he notes, bya temporary suspension of their operation as ‘a Water Company’ (121). By theend of the 1817–18 season, Sadler’s Wells must have seemed in desperate needof rebranding.Grimaldi’s reinstatement in 1818 helped relieve some of Charles the Younger’s

anxieties—but it also produced others. The terms of Grimaldi’s return included hispurchase of new shares in the theatre, which its manager clearly resented. ‘ATheatre’,Charles the Younger remarked, ‘should be like an absolute Monarchy—as a limitedMonarchy it will dwindle—as a Republic (of Proprietors and Committees) theadministration will get into confusion, and confusion is the forerunner of defeat’(Memoirs, 122). This distaste formanagement by committee as opposed to individualdirection taps into what David Francis Taylor has identified as ‘the constitutiveideological tensions that lie behind the polarized constructions of manager-as-despotand manager-as-trustee’.48 Sadler’s Wells had been run by a committee since the1816–17 season, following the deaths of Richard Hughes and William Reeves(in 1815), and Thomas Dibdin’s sale of his shares to Hughes’s widow. DavidArundell observes that during the first committee season profits fell by £570.49Internal division among the partners had resulted in a ‘complete paralysis’ of theHaymarket in 1813.50 It is significant, therefore, that Charles the Younger shouldcite ‘a dispute between my Partners and myself ’ (124) as the main reason for hisdeparture from Sadler’s Wells at the end of the 1819–20 season; and, moreover, thathe should have stated such open preference for an autocratic model of management,notwithstanding its obviously negative associations (which other managers, as Taylorshows, worked so hard to revise, at least publicly).51

47 The letter is quoted in David Arundell, The Story of Sadler’s Wells 1683–1964 (London: HamishHamilton, 1965), 92–3.

48 David Francis Taylor, ‘Theatre Managers and the Managing of Theatre History’, in Swindellsand Taylor, Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 70–88, 70.

49 Arundell, Sadler’s Wells, 91.50 William Burling, Summer Theatre in London 1661–1820, and the Rise of the Haymarket Theatre

(London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 195.51 Taylor, ‘Theatre Managers’, 86–8.




YOUNG ARTHUR

Charles the Younger began writing Young Arthur in the winter of 1818, putativelyto ‘divert [his] mind’ from the theatre’s troubles and ‘for the purpose of combattingsome greatly prevailing polemical and political opinions’ (Memoirs, 124). His turnto romance is a suggestive one. The genre was in fashion in the 1810s: Byron hadused the label ‘romaunt’ for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, while Thomas Moore’s‘Oriental Romance’ of Lallah Rookh, as already mentioned, had been adapted byCharles the Younger for the stage in 1817. The success enjoyed by these poems furthersuggests that commercial considerations were likely to have been just as prevalent inCharles the Younger’s decision to describe Young Arthur as ‘a metrical romance’.Young Arthur was published by the Longman, Hurst, and Rees consortium ofbooksellers and was relatively expensive at 14s. for an octavo of 322 pages. It promisedincome that its author desperately needed by 1819 (then in debtor’s jail, pleading ‘awee bit bread’, as his verse dramatically explains).52 But in much the same way thatByron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage exceeds its designation as a ‘romaunt’, so too doesYoung Arthur’s generic classification prove something of a misnomer.Charles the Younger’s long poem is divided into eleven ‘Subjects’ (rather than

books), each featuring a ‘Variation’ in the manner of Henry Fielding’s prefatorychapters to The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749). The third Variation, forexample, is entitled ‘A Short Stop for breathing, with Hints in Hudibrastic’. Thereare also several shorter inset poems, ballads, songs, and footnotes throughout. Thisdiversity garnered mixed criticism. The Literary Gazette suggested that ‘Songs,laments, episodes, ballads, hymns &c are introduced so abundantly, as to givethe whole the air of a medley, rather than a uniform composition’, while theLiterary Chronicle suggested that such variety was bound to suit ‘all palates’.53‘Medley’ is the keyword here. As David Duff explains, British Romantic texts tendto fall into one of two camps: ‘Typically, they overstate, overperform, or protest toomuch about their generic affiliations, often by fusing genres and multiplying theirgeneric identity . . .Or, alternatively, they subvert, ironize, or conceal their genericprovenance, aspiring to transcend their chosen genre or delivering only a partial ormarginal performance of it.’54 ‘In theory as well as in critical practice’, RobynWarhol-Down argues, ‘genre is not a neat classification system for settling ques-tions about what texts mean or how they work. Instead, the concept of genre opensup vistas on the ways a text can function in literary history, in a reader’s hands andmind, or in material developments within the extratextual world.’55 In YoungArthur Charles the Younger takes clear satisfaction in pushing at the limits of hisreaders’ expectations.

52 Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, Young Arthur; or, The Child of Mystery: A Metrical Romance(London, 1819), 95. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

53 Literary Gazette (July 1819): 484; Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (August 1819): 212.54 David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19.55 Robyn Warhol-Down, ‘Introduction: Genre Regenerated’, in Robyn Warhol-Down (ed.), The

Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (Cambridge, MA: English Institute incollaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, 2011), unpaginated (20).

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The poem represents an ambitious performance in terms of its geographic asmuch as its generic span. Between them, the poem’s male protagonists, Ernest (theeponymous ‘Young Arthur’) and Allan experience adventures in Peru, Tunis, andthe Arabian deserts. But England, significantly, provides the point of return for allof the poem’s characters. Frequently apostrophized as a land of liberty and benefi-cence, the poem repeatedly invites its readers to make parallels between Englandin the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To this end, the Variations arerecognizably modern, often addressing the reader directly and making severalreferences to contemporary culture. Their relation to the main narrative is some-times rendered explicit, as in Subject VII, wherein Allan’s description of ‘the sultrySimoom’s poisonous gale’ is glossed by a footnote defining the Simoom as ‘a balefulwind that blows perpetually over the desarts [sic] of Arabia; to which Europeansgenerally fall a sacrifice’ (Young Arthur, 188). This image is then reused in theaccompanying Variation (‘The Groans of Britain, and a Legend ad libitum’), wherethe narrator offers a penetrative diagnosis of the moral state of the nation:

O Albion, bless’d beyond all other climes!Stock, politics, cash payments, or the times,Thy only plagues—except (hence, wary be)That all confounding siren, luxury;. . .

No dread Simooms thy healthful shore disease,Thy hale Simoom the happy trade wind’s breeze,Which to thy busy wharfs, o’er billows curl’d,Wafts the best blessings of an envying world. (191)

The passage testifies to the acute concern over moral values that characterized thepostwar years. ‘There is scarcely a page in which some moral truth is not expressed,or some vice held up to detestation, or some folly satirized,’ affirmed the LiteraryChronicle.56 The warning against luxury, for instance, is inflected, not only by themain narrative’s description of the Spanish conquest of Peru (‘The Stranger’sTale’, Subject III) but by repeated attacks on the dandy as ‘a new insect of the19th century . . . a non-descript’ (231).Charles the Younger’s other chief satirical target in the poem is religious

fanaticism, justifying a curious reference to ‘the imposter’ Joanna Southcott(Young Arthur, 127), and two extended passages on differences between religiouscreeds that define Variation V and Subject VII. In each instance, the author adds afootnote in which he insists that his attack is not directed at religious sects but ‘the“troublers of religion”’ (126) or ‘the sanctimonious’ (169), as he later calls them.Charles the Younger here conforms to what Eric Hobsbawm has illuminatinglydescribed as a ‘marked parallelism between the movements of religious, social andpolitical consciousness’.57

56 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (August 1819): 212.57 As quoted in Thompson, English Working Class, 427.




At this point it is worth noting that the proprietors of Sadler’s Wells tookdeliberate care to remove prostitutes from the theatre and to promote middle-class moral values. Islington became ‘an area noted for its evangelical churches,schools, hospitals and reformatories’, its urbanization taking off between 1800 and1821 when new streets such as Exmouth Street, Myddleton Street, Spencer Street,and Ashby Street were built to accommodate the middle classes.58 This middle-class reformation of Islington was as much behind Charles the Younger’s attemptsto reinvent Sadler’s Wells’ postwar repertoire as it was influential to the shaping ofYoung Arthur’s moralistic vein.The points of contact between Charles the Younger’s poetic and theatrical

enterprises can be seen in the various performance-related allusions that recurthroughout Young Arthur. These take a range of forms, from the song ‘Fancydipp’d her pen in dew’, used as the opening for Subject VII and glossed ina footnote as having been ‘sung by Miss Stephens, composed by Mr Whitaker’(Young Arthur, 164), to ‘Sir Brandon’s History’ (Subject IX), which is prefaced by acurious roll-call of the contemporary actors who most distinguished themselves in therole of Richard III (Garrick, Kemble, Cooke, Young, and Kean). Such observationsobviously detract from the romance narrative, but rarely without purpose. (Thelatter, in particular, is likely to have been intended as a sly dig at Astley’s Amphi-theatre, where an equestrian version of Richard III had recently been performed.)59It is not entirely surprising, then, that notwithstanding its label as a ‘metrical

romance’, several magazines and journals catalogued Young Arthur as a ‘drama’.60This generic confusion can be regarded as a fruitful extension of the ‘medley-like’qualities attributed to Young Arthur specifically, and which, in light of Duff ’sargument, we can also see as representative of Romantic literature more generally.Although his earliest publication had been a volume of poems called PoeticalAttempts: by a Young Man (1792), Charles the Younger was clearly anxious aboutthe state of modern poetry and the likely reception that would be accorded toYoung Arthur. In the poem’s preface he takes care to define himself against thegreater celebrity of both his father and brother Thomas (‘author of severalDramas, and a Metrical History of England’ (Young Arthur, vi)), while hisintroduction satirizes modern poetry as a degenerate form. The ‘monitory’function that Gérard Genette associates with the preface is certainly active here,as Charles the Younger advises readers both ‘why’ and ‘how’ his romance shouldbe read.61 What he fails to explain, of course, is that Young Arthur is not, asargued above, much of a romance at all. Consequently, as the poem develops,

58 Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 109.

59 Unmarked clipping, Victoria and AlbertMuseumTheatre Collection, ‘Astley’s Amphitheatre’ box.60 The ‘New Publications’ issued by the Quarterly Review (April 1819: 559) thus labelled the poem

a ‘drama’. The Edinburgh Annual Register, on the other hand, listed Young Arthur under ‘Novels, Talesand Romances’ (January 1819: 510).

61 Gérard Genette, Paratexts, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), 197.

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what passes as the preface’s customary modesty topos becomes an invitation forcriticism, rather than a forestalling of it: ‘Sir, I hope you’re a much betterChristian than poet,’ the narrator later states (299).The Literary Chronicle, which published the most enthusiastic of Young Arthur’s

reviews, insisted that authorial apologies were unnecessary. The reviewer not onlyaffirms that Charles the Younger already enjoyed ‘a pretty firm hold of the public’,but goes so far as to suggest that the short Hymn in Subject III (‘There is an eye thatall surveys’) is a composition worthy of Isaac Watts and Joseph Addison.62 TheLiterary Gazette concurred—to an extent. Charles the Younger’s reputation, itsreviewer explained, was as ‘a writer generally engaged in less laboured compositions;and accustomed to snatch a temporary achievement of the day, rather than toaddress himself to more grave and elevated efforts’. But ‘the practice of writing for aminor theatre is most likely to improve, than deteriorate literary talent’, thereviewer added, reminding readers of the Dibdin family’s celebrity.63 On thispoint the Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal disagreed entirely, however. Charlesthe Younger was but a pale imitation of his father: ‘Where is the vigour,—whereis the neatness,—where is the good-humoured flow of soul of that lamentedparent?’64 Although the review concludes by asserting that a ‘frivolous, vain, andvapid race of modern poets’ meant that poetry itself was in a bad state, theMonthlyReview had little time to spare for Charles the Younger’s attempts to show off histalents for different rhyme schemes and forms.Young Arthur was simply not enough of ‘a romance’ and too much of a mixed

performance. Refusing fully to honour his promise of ‘a metrical romance’, Charlesthe Younger produced, instead, a ‘medley’, characterized by similar strategies tothose he pursued as an arranger of pantomimes. The pantomime was a form thatalways aimed at more than one subject: as Mayer explains, ‘Its structure enabledfleeting comedy or satire to be directed at many topics without requiring that theybe shown in a logical or plausible sequence.’65 Young Arthur’s generic indeterminacythus gained considerably greater purchase fromCharles the Younger’s understandingthat with pantomimes, especially, it was often preferable to be ‘random’ rather than‘precise’.66 This theatrical context permits Young Arthur to be read productively as apoetic translation of the ‘whole programme’ offered by a minor theatre such asSadler’s Wells, where the nightly entertainments ranged from pantomimes to melo-dramas, with dancing, singing, and gymnastic feats in between.

THE ‘MEDLEY ’ AS METAPHOR

Shortly after completing Young Arthur, Charles the Younger opened his final seasonat Sadler’s Wells. The year 1819 would prove a difficult one for most of London’s

62 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (August 1819): 211.63 Literary Gazette (July 1819): 484.64 Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal (February 1820): 211.65 Mayer, Harlequin, 6. 66 Ibid.




minor theatres, including the Sans Pareil, Olympic, and indeed even the Haymarket,London’s summer patent theatre. The study of Sadler’s Wells’ history between 1814and 1819 allows us to make various inferences as to the reasons for Charles theYounger’s unexpected departure, and to put pressure on the too tidy narrative that heprovides in his Memoirs. Generalized postwar depression and discontent certainlyimpinged upon the manager’s success, but other, more immediately practical con-siderations were also at stake, as this chapter has outlined. By the late 1810s, Sadler’sWells faced increased competition in the form of rival spectacular entertainments, thedifficulties of operating in a period of acute political unrest, and localized frictionwithin its own managerial committee.Charles the Younger was not, finally, able to weather the storm and, in his own

words, found himself ‘a Captain out of Commission’ (Memoirs, 126). Whereas JaneScott at the Sans Pareil was able to keep her theatre successful by engaging in a‘daily weaving of variations upon successful patterns’,67 after 1817 this was less ofan option for Charles the Younger, whose audiences had tired of the ‘novelty’ ofaquatic exhibitions after more than a decade of such entertainments. But theextended staging of a wartime repertoire at Sadler’s Wells, for example, pointsnot only to Charles the Younger’s attempts to deliver continuity, but to takeadvantage of his reputation in order to engage with postwar politics at a time ofsignificant repression.Although the government’s clampdown on radical opinion makes it difficult to

recover Charles the Younger’s political allegiances with any confidence, the enter-tainments at Sadler’s Wells and Young Arthur mutually suggest that he wascommitted to advancing limited reform. Acutely aware of his own and his audi-ences’ social standing, Charles the Younger responded to and actively encouragedthe development of Islington’s middle-class communities by investing ever moreheavily in a moralistic repertoire, both on stage and off, as exemplified by YoungArthur. The metaphor of the ‘medley’ offers a neat embodiment of this, not leastbecause during the course of the nineteenth century the musical medley wouldbecome increasingly associated with a popular audience, while music for the eliteconcentrated more exclusively on one genre or perspective. Literary, musical, anddramatic medleys were not, of course, one and the same: but the notion of a blendingtogether that allows for influences to remain distinct provides, perhaps, the mostuseful model by which to examine the imbrication of theatrical and political econ-omies that characterized Charles the Younger’s final years at Sadler’s Wells.

67 Bratton, ‘Jane Scott’, 95.

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10Writing for Actors

The Dramas of Thomas Dibdin

Jim Davis

Thomas Dibdin was ‘a prolific dramatist and an incredibly hard-working theatricaljack-of-all-trades: songwriter, scene-painter, actor, prompter, stage manager, the-atre manager, and author of some 250 plays’.1 As well as early employment in theprovinces he worked at various times at Sadler’s Wells, Covent Garden, DruryLane, the Surrey, and the Haymarket theatres. His Reminiscences attest to thecollaborative nature of his engagement in contemporary theatre-making and tothe fact that individual agency was often subsumed by the collective needs oftheatres and their companies. As such he was very much part of a series of theatricalnetworks that, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, his own father, among others,had helped to foster. In this chapter I want to look specifically at Thomas Dibdinthe dramatist and collaborator, both in terms of Leigh Hunt’s hostile criticalreaction to his work and in terms of Thomas Dibdin’s creation of roles for actors.Hunt opens his Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres by

remarking, ‘The first time I ever saw a play was in March 1800 . . .After that I waspresent at the comedies of Mr Reynolds and of Mr Dibdin, and I laughed veryheartily at the grimaces of the actors; but somehow or another I never recollected aword of the dialogue. [To] any schoolboy, who had been accustomed to nothingbut natural objects, all the Irishmen, and all the gabbling humourists are alike, theauthor becomes a mere dependent on the player.’2 Hunt considered that comedyon the printed page was rendered unreadable, since the contemporary dramatist’sprincipal design in forming a character was to ‘adapt it to that peculiar style of theactor, which the huge farces have rendered necessary to their existence’.3 Thusrustic characters were always adapted to John Emery, while ‘the loss of Mundenwho gives [Modern Comedy] such a variety of grin would affect [the author] littleless than a lock-jaw’.4 Criticizing, in particular, the comedies of Frederick Reynoldsand Thomas Dibdin, Hunt complains that both dramatists created unnatural

1 Michael R. Booth (ed.), English Plays of the Nineteenth Century V. Pantomimes, Extravaganzas andBurlesques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 69.

2 Leigh Hunt, Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres including General Observationson the practise and genius of the stage (London, 1807), vii–viii.

3 Ibid., viii. 4 Ibid., vii.



characters that the comic actors were forced ‘to grimace and grin . . . into applause’,creating bad habits from which they were unable thereafter to wean themselves:‘The extravagance therefore of look and gesture, so necessary to the caricatures ofour farci-comic writers, they cannot help carrying into the characters of our bestdramatists, to which it is every way injurious.’5 Although Hunt later backtracked tosome degree in his criticism of both dramatists and actors, he inadvertently drawsattention to just how dependent dramatists were on the creative skills of the comicactors for whom they wrote. Yet he regularly attacks Thomas Dibdin, as in hisscathing review of Bonifacio and Bridgetina, or in his passing comments on Dibdinand other dramatists as ‘a standing jest’6 in a review of The Conscious Lovers.Bonifacio and Bridgetina; or the Knight of the Hermitage; or the Windmill Turrett;

or the Spectre of the North-East Gallery (Covent Garden, 1808) was, for Hunt, ‘themost stupid piece of impertinence that has disgraced the English stage for someyears past’. Indeed, he continues, ‘when such a writer as Mr T. Dibdin commencesdramatic satirist, the critics must naturally be surprised enough to enquire into hispretensions to so unexpected an office’.7 In Hunt’s view Thomas Dibdin’s incap-acity to write effective melodramas rendered him equally incapable of burlesquingthe form: ‘Mr Dibdin, who has no sort of taste for real heroic, has of course beentotally ignorant how to ridicule the violation of it in others.’8 For Hunt, Dibdin’sfailure was an inability to understand burlesque and the mock heroic and how touse them effectively. Whatever the shortcomings of Dibdin’s burlesque, the playitself certainly belies Hunt’s dismissive rejection, for it provides an effective andearly example of theatrical satire on melodramatic excess, which both critiques andshows affection for the form. The prelude to the play is set in a corridor behind theboxes just before the play begins. The author lists the many melodramatic featuresincluded in his play, to which another character, Medley, responds:

MEDLEY: Then, what else can be wanting?AUTHOR: Nothing but a conflagration in the last scene; the combustibles for which

are in preparation at this very moment.MEDLEY: Such things should finish with a conflagration; but how d’ye put it out?AUTHOR: Can’t you guess?MEDLEY: No.AUTHOR: No! then you shall own this to be the most surprising thing of all, and only

reserved for this age to accomplish.We absolutelymean to extinguish it with real waterMEDLEY: Extinguish fire with real water! My dear boy, let me embrace you!9

Later in the actual play, after being confined to a haunted windmill tower, theheroine declares, ‘Upon my honour, if the balcony was a little lower, I’d throwmyself down, and be dashed to pieces, before I’d put up with this usage.’10 These

5 Ibid., 81.6 Examiner (21 January 1810), cited in L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (eds), Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic

Criticism 1808–1831 (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1950), 35.7 Ibid., 10 (Examiner, 10 April 1808). 8 Ibid., 11 (Examiner, 10 April 1808).9 Thomas Dibdin, Bonifacio and Bridgetina; or, The Knight of the Hermitage; or, The Windmill

Turrett; or, The Spectre of the North-East Gallery (London, 1808), 11–12.10 Ibid., 43.

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examples seem no better or worse than other examples of melodrama burlesques;indeed, subsequent commentators have been to Thomas Dibdin than Hunt whendiscussing Bonifacio and Bridgetina.11In his Autobiography Hunt indicates that his chastisement of contemporary

dramatists was not altogether fair: ‘I forgot that it was I who was the mere boy,and that they knew twenty times more of the world than I did.’12 However, heseems less than contrite about his treatment of Thomas Dibdin, who had dared towrite a letter (which Hunt published) complaining of a review Hunt had written.On 10 April 1807 Hunt published a review of the pantomime Ogre and LittleThumb, lambasting the author, whom he assumed must be Thomas Dibdin onaccount of the ‘very bad’ English introduced into the ‘very short’ songs written forthe piece. He continued:

It requires some degree of condescension in a critic to enter into a disquisition on thecomedies of Mr. Dibdin, but to notice his pantomimes would have been an intolerabletask, had we not thought it necessary to caution parents how they introduce theirchildren to spectacles in which both the human mind and the human body arerendered disgustingly monstrous, and which may excite a prematurity of imaginationwithout exalting, refining, or moralising it.13

Dibdin’s restrained response remonstrated with Hunt for what he felt was his‘unfair critical hostility’14 towards him, while also pointing out he was not theauthor of the pantomime in question. Hunt, however, returned to the attack,claiming that Dibdin ‘with the usual importance of endured scribblers, talks of thefrequent indulgence shown him by the public; that is, he has assisted to deprave thetaste of the town and then he is tolerated by it . . .After all, where is this fanciedindulgence shown to Mr. Dibdin, or Mr. Reynolds, or Mr. Cherry, or Mr. Cobb,or to any other disgrace of the stage?’15Hunt had continually excoriated contemporary dramatists for their low stand-

ards. In 1807 he attacked the Haymarket Theatre, which provided Londoners witha diet of comedy and farce during the summer season, in a polemical piece writtenfor theNews. He complained that its endless revival of old ‘hits’, such as The Heir atLaw, Catch Him Who Can, and Five Miles Off, ‘may be compared to that merrymachine in a fair, the round-about. It appears, season after season, of the sameancient wooden composition, a little newly painted, with the same unchangeablepowers of attraction, and the same monotony of entertainment.’16 Hunt regrettedthat the manager, George Colman the Younger, was providing the theatre withplays by ‘those miserable writers he now endures’ instead of his own dramas. YetHunt’s mistake was to apply his literary notions of what the Drama should be,without taking into account the commercial considerations of running a theatre,

11 See V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London:Methuen & Co., 1952, repr. 1973), 88–90; Booth, English Plays, 30–1.

12 J. E. Morpurgo (ed.), The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (London: The Cresset Press, 1959), 15.13 William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (eds), Dramatic Essays by Leigh Hunt (London, 1894),

xxviii.14 Ibid., xxviii. 15 Ibid., xxix. 16 News (21 June 1807).




the demands of the audience, and the requirements of the actors. Comic actorssuch as John Liston, Joseph Munden, and John Fawcett relied heavily ontechnique and established comic personas; the literary quality of their materialwas largely irrelevant. Nevertheless, Hunt wrote a series of articles devoted to ananalysis of the decline in comic drama, which were printed in the News duringthe summer of 1807.Hunt felt that the bad side of early-nineteenth-century comedy was epitomized

in the writings of Theodore Hook, Reynolds, and Thomas Dibdin. He accusedthem of using too many puns and of deforming (or exaggerating) comic charactersin order to obtain easy laughs. He found their language either too flowery or toofamiliar and disapproved of their frequent attempts to win the audience’s sympathythrough an affectation of loyalty or through obsequious prologues and epilogues.Consequently, the qualities of the best eighteenth-century comedies had nowdegenerated into ‘mere noise and grimace’.17 Lack of critical opinion was toblame for this, due to the political involvement and/or partisanship of newspapereditors. Deprived of these external constraints, comedy had sloughed off its moralresponsibilities, representing characters who were often too far-fetched to offer anyresemblance to the criticism of real life.Simultaneously, many authors acknowledged that the plays and roles they

created for actors were mere sketches that the actors then filled out. This wascertainly the case with Charles Mathews the Elder, whose adeptness at filling outthe parts which others wrote for him as mere sketches implies a mixture ofobservation and imagination that enabled him to achieve a range of originalcreations. The part of Dick Cypher in Hit or Miss (1810), for example, was writtenfor Mathews by Isaac Pocock ‘with a mere outline (as it often happened) forMr. Mathews to fill up’.18 Flexible, in James Kenney’s Love, Law and Physic (1812),was initially a part that dissatisfied Mathews, as it was ‘one of those productionswhich [he] so frequently had presented to him “to fill up for himself” ’.19 IndeedHook pays tribute, in his prefaces to Music Mad (1807) and Killing No Murder(1809), to Mathews’ ability to bring to life and fill out the mere sketches that Hookhad written.20 Hook, whom Hunt considered ‘would not do better if he were towrite badly on purpose’,21 conceded that he was providing ‘sketches’ or ‘outlines’,although his novel Gilbert Gurney reveals just how chastening it was for thedramatist to be present at the first reading of their play in the green room. Gurney,like Hook, is a young playwright, lucky enough to have a play accepted by theHaymarket management. He soon learns that professional jealousies have to beassuaged—‘If Mr Mathews had a song, Mr Liston would expect to have one also’—and is chastened by the actors’ lack of enthusiasm on the first reading of the play.

17 News (30 August 1807).18 Isaac Pocock, Hit or Miss! A Musical Farce in Two Acts (London, 1811), 3, and Ann Mathews,

Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian 4 vols (London, 1839), 1:421.19 Mathews, Memoirs, 2:223.20 Theodore Hook, Music Mad. A Dramatic Sketch (London, 1808), iii–iv.21 News (20 September 1807).

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He makes it clear that the power lies with the actors rather than with the authors indetermining what will be performed, particularly regarding the question of whetherthe actors will be willing to undertake the roles assigned them.22If we were to analyse Thomas Dibdin’s career as a dramatist on the basis of

Hunt’s strictures, we might well find him wanting. However, if we consider howDibdin enables the creativity of actors and engages with the requirements oftheatres and managements, we may arrive at different conclusions. In his prefaceto Thomas Dibdin’s The Cabinet George Daniel draws attention to the dramatist’sassumed role in casting the opera, first performed at Covent Garden in 1802:‘[T]he author appears to have had his own way in choosing his performers; hence,there have been few pieces better acted, or more favourably received.’23 The opera,says Daniel, was composed for the ‘exclusive display’ of the popular singer, JohnBraham: ‘There is no character with which Braham is so completely identified asPrince Orlando. The songs are his individual and exclusive property; and anyoneattempting to sing them is like an invasion of his right. Among the most favouriteare—My Beautiful Maid, Fair Ellen, and the celebrated Palocca.’24 AlthoughDibdin wrote many songs, not many were as successful as some of those hewrote for The Cabinet. Yet even the process of providing songs for this and otherdramas was a complicated process:

In the course of rehearsing ‘The Cabinet,’ I met with innumerable difficulties respect-ing the songs, &c. Incledon and Braham were to be kept equally in the foreground:if one had a ballad, the other was also to have one; each a martial or hunting-song; eacha bravura; and they were to have a duett, in which each was to lead alternately.I, however, managed so as not to affect the general construction of the opera, althoughI wrote nearly twenty different subjects for music before I satisfied every one: several ofthese were to suit the difficult taste of Madame Storace . . .Yet ‘The Cabinet’ gave meinfinitely less trouble than any opera I subsequently produced. ‘Zuma,’ in particular, hadso many additional and unnecessary scenes written for the introduction of bravuras,concerted pieces, &c. and became so altered in the essential parts of its story, . . . that,when produced, it no more resembled its former self, than ‘She Stoops to Conquer’would be like the ‘Battle of Hexham’.25

Dibdin acknowledges that, as an author, he is required to meet the demands ofactors and managers, sometimes with dire consequences to the cohesion of thedrama as originally written. Yet he is also generous towards actors, many of whommaterially contributed to the success of his plays. Dibdin certainly recognized hisindebtedness to actors for bringing his plays to life. Not only did he dedicate histwo-act farceWhat Next? to the comic actor William Dowton, whose contributionto the success of one of his earliest plays The Jew and the Doctor he acknowledges inhis Reminiscences, but he wrote in his preface that, while Shakespeare and Terence

22 Theodore Hook, Gilbert Gurney, 3 vols (London, 1836), 1:80–1.23 George Daniel, ‘Remarks’, in Thomas Dibdin, The Cabinet (New edn, London, 1829), 4.24 Ibid., 4.25 Thomas Dibdin, Reminiscences, 1:323–4. Zuma was first performed at Covent Garden in 1818.

Harris was the manager of Covent Garden.




had also availed themselves of the Plautine origins of the piece, he doubted whether‘either of those great authors were ever seconded by such actors as those who havesupported this farce. Mr. Dowton and Mr. Knight must be seen, to estimate theauthor’s obligations to them; Mr. Oxberry has made much out of nothing.’26The importance of collaboration is certainly true of Thomas Dibdin’s relation-

ship with Joseph Grimaldi, whom he knew through his association with Sadler’sWells Theatre. He claims that he advised Harris, the Covent Garden manager, toengage Grimaldi, which he did in 1806, and that he persuaded Grimaldi to askHarris for a higher salary than he had originally intended.27 During Grimaldi’s firstseason Thomas Dibdin revived a pantomime that had been rejected by themanagement five years earlier, Harlequin and Mother Goose, or The Golden Egg,the unexpected success of which consolidated Grimaldi’s reputation as the out-standing Clown of Regency pantomime and accentuated the process of placing theClown as the central character in the genre. Dibdin’s Harlequin in his Element; orFire, Water, Air and Earth (1807) was performed the following year; Grimaldisubsequently looked back on this pantomime as one of his favourites.28 Withoutthe combination of Grimaldi’s talent as a performer, Dibdin’s facility at creatingpantomimes, and Charles Farley’s skill at staging them, the history of Englishpantomime might have turned out very differently.

MUNDEN AND DIBDIN

In order to argue further for Thomas Dibdin’s value as a dramatist to actors, I wantto consider roles that he wrote specifically for two comic actors, Joseph Munden(1758–1832) and John Liston (1776–1846). Thomas Dibdin wrote several partsfor Munden, who specialized in low comedy roles. In 1790 Munden joined theCovent Garden company in London, scoring a particular success in 1792 as OldDornton in Thomas Holcroft’s The Road to Ruin, one of many old gentlemen rolesin which he came to specialize. In 1811 he moved to Drury Lane, where he createdfew new roles, retiring in May 1824. Charles Lamb considered him the outstandinglow comedian of his generation: ‘There is one face of Farley, one of Knight, one(but what a one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pindown and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, inunaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely newset of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian as acompany . . .He, and he alone, literally makes faces.’29 For Lamb, Munden was nomere caricaturist, but a comic actor capable of deep and subtle characterization.

26 Thomas Dibdin, What Next?, in Thomas Dibdin (ed.), The London Theatre, 6 vols (London,1815), 2:3. Oxberry and Knight were also popular comic actors.

27 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 1:399–400.28 Richard Findlater, Joe Grimaldi, His Life and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1978), 125.29 Charles Lamb, ‘On the Acting of Munden’, in R. H. Shepherd (ed.), The Complete Works in

Prose and Verse of Charles Lamb (London, 1878), 375.

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In 1799 Covent Garden produced, says Thomas Dibdin, ‘a musical piece incommemoration of our numerous naval triumphs . . . the principal character in itwas a Quaker, which was inimitably well acted by Mr Munden’.30 This was TheNaval Pillar, and it led to pressure on Dibdin to drop the Quaker character byElizabeth Inchbald, who was shortly to bring out a comedy containing a full familyof Quakers. Dibdin refused and was supported by the Covent Garden managementin so doing. In the same year he was responsible for The Birthday, adapted fromKotzebue’s Die Versöhnung, in which two feuding brothers are reconciled. One ofthe brothers, Captain Bertram, was played by Munden. According to Munden’sson, his father ‘always considered that Captain Bertram was his chef d’oeuvre insentimental comedy; so unique was his performance, that few have attempted thepart since’.31Although some coolness subsequently arose between Munden and Thomas

Dibdin after the former withdrew from one of Dibdin’s plays he had beenrehearsing,32 they were soon reconciled. In 1815, by which time Munden hadmoved to Drury Lane, Dibdin was to provide the actor with his last original part,that of Dozey in Past Ten O’Clock and a Rainy Night. This, says Dibdin, ‘was givenwith the same excellence which characterised his Captain Bertram, Mainmast, andseveral other parts I had the good fortune to write for him’.33 Munden played aGreenwich pensioner, in the service of a master called Old Snaps. The play wassimple and Munden’s son implies that ‘there was little in the part itself, which, inthe hands of an ordinary actor, would have been insignificant’ and that his fatherhad ‘slender materials to work upon’.34 However he ‘took as much pains with hispart, as if he were a young actor struggling for fame. He dressed and painted the oldGreenwich pensioner to the life (he painted his neck which was bare) and labouredto produce a perfect personification. His chief point in the dialogue was thedescription of a naval engagement, in which he was wonderfully energetic, andwas cheered by loud bursts of applause from the audience.’35 The role was selectedby Munden for his farewell performance at Drury Lane on 31 May 1824, and it isthanks to this occasion that we possess several accounts of his performance asDozey. Particularly valuable are those by T. N. Talfourd and by Lamb. Talfourdrefers to the ‘sublime stupidity’ of drunken Dozey and considers it the mostextraordinary of all Munden’s personifications, for ‘[t]his old tar—stupefied withage and grog—seemed absolutely grand in the robustness of his frame and therolling self-satisfaction of his gait, as one who had out-braved ‘a thousand storms,a thousand thunders’. For Talfourd ‘it was indeed a triumph of art . . . a morecharacteristic picture was never exhibited in the drollest farce; nor was ever a trueror nobler burst of feeling called forth in the stateliest tragedy’.36

30 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 1:261.31 T. S. Munden, Memoir of Joseph Shepherd Munden, Comedian (London, 1846), 80.32 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 1:290. 33 Ibid., 2:44.34 Munden, Memoir, 242. 35 Ibid., 243.36 New Monthly Magazine (May, 1824), quoted in Munden, Memoir, 299.




Lamb’s comments are equally eulogistic. He refers to the audience’s familiaritywith ‘old tobacco-complexioned Dozey’, for they had all previously seen ‘theweather-beaten old pensioner, dear old Dozey, tacking about the stage in thatintense blue sea-livery—drunk as heart could wish, and right valorous in memory’.37After seeing Munden play the other role selected for his farewell benefit, Sir RobertBramble in Colman’s The Poor Gentleman, Lamb reports:

[I]n the farce he became richer and richer. Old Dozey is a plant from Greenwich. Thebronzed face—and neck to match—the long curtain of a coat—the straggling whitehair,—the propensity, the determined attachment to grog—are all from Greenwich.Munden, as Dozey, seems never to have been out of action, sun, and drink . . .His faceand throat were dried like a raisin—and his legs walked under the rum-and-water withall the indecision which that inestimable beverage usually inspires. It is truly tacking,not walking. He steers at a table, and the tide of grog now and then bears him off thepoint . . . In the scene where Dozey describes a sea fight, the actor was never greater,and he seemed the personification of an old seventy-four!38

Even if, as Munden’s son suggests, the role might not have fared so well in thehands of an ordinary actor, Thomas Dibdin clearly provided Munden with thefreedom and scope to create one of his most memorable and successful roles.

LISTON AND DIBDIN

John Liston made his first London appearance as a comic actor at the Haymarketsummer season of 1805, subsequently joining the Covent Garden company thatautumn. He made little impact initially, but his pairing with Charles Mathews atthe Haymarket for a consecutive series of summer seasons helped to establish hisreputation. He excelled in a line of arrogant, conceited, cowardly, and parochialprovincial and cockney characters, often written especially for him, but also playedcomic roles in melodrama, Shakespeare, and Scott adaptations. In 1823 he joinedthe Drury Lane company, but created the outstanding success of his career, the titlerole in Paul Pry, at the Haymarket in 1825. From 1831 until his retirement in1837, he played comic roles at the Olympic Theatre under the management ofEliza Vestris. Liston’s celebrity as a low comedian was to some extent involuntary.His face and body were grotesque and ludicrous—one reason why his likeness wasso often depicted by contemporary caricaturists—and his mere presence on stagewas sometimes sufficient cause for laughter. He also excelled at suggesting vacuity:‘In his portraits of some of the heroes of cockney-land, he manages to exclude theslightest glimmering of intelligence from his countenance, and at the same timecontrives to throw into it an air of conceit and self-satisfaction, which conveysto you he is not only without an idea, but that any attempt to innoculate [sic]

37 London Magazine (May, 1824), quoted in Munden, Memoir, 300.38 Ibid., 301–2.

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him with one would be altogether hopeless.’39 Despite the seeming effort-lessness of his performances, many critics attested to his technical skill and carefulstudy as an actor.This popular comic actor played in several pieces by Thomas Dibdin, including

Five Miles Off or, The Finger Post (1806), Harlequin Hoax (1814), and Morning,Noon and Night (1822). Colman the Younger, then manager of the Haymarket,had commissioned Five Miles Off from Dibdin for the sum of £200.40 The plothinged upon the confusion caused by a finger (sign) post pointing in the wrongdirection. Liston played Flourish, a painter and Quaker, whose job was to put thesignpost to rights. He informed the audience of this in the Quaker vernacular, ‘Itappertaineth not unto my business to set it right; he hath left it pointing to thepaths of error;—and I will bear witness against him, when the travellers he may leadastray shall seek redress from the men of wigs and long coats who are termedlawyers, and perplex us like the labyrinths of the little person called Cupid, intowhose clutches I was once betrayed.’ He then sang a song that opened with thewords ‘Yea I fell into the pit of love / With a ti tum ti’, designed to produce acomic effect, since Quakers were forbidden to sing by their sect.41 The song, infact, proved very popular and was frequently encored in performance. Liston waspraised by Hunt for the dry humour with which he played the part.42 Hunt wasparticularly impressed by the way in which Liston had divested the character ofstage exaggeration, especially as Dibdin had left room for ‘the caricaturing fancyof the actor’. He merely let the Quaker’s absurdity speak for itself; unlike thestage Quaker: ‘He neither walked in one undeviating straight line, nor glued hisclasped hands to his bosom, nor conversed in the recitative of a parish clerk, norrose at every emphasis upon his toe, nor ended all his speeches with a nasalgroan.’43 Hunt consistently praised the actors for bringing to life roles by authorswhom he despised. Yet, whatever the shortcomings in the writing, the actor’sperformance would be impossible without the stimulus of the playwright, how-ever sketchy or broad the outline.Colman acknowledges the importance of the playwright in his prologue to the

play, which was spoken by another popular comic actor, John Fawcett. Colmanbegins with an attack on contemporary critics, regretting that:

SOME Hypercritic cries, in ev’ry age,‘How rich the past, how poor the present Stage!’

Nevertheless, despite the critic’s obsession with past glories and tendency to denigratethe theatre of the present, the judgement of audiences can always be trusted:

Still thrives our Stage, still seems there vigour in’t;For you smile here, while cynics scowl in print,Plain proof, you think, whate’er our Stage may be,Such critics infinitely worse than we!

39 New York Mirror (5 March 1831). 40 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 1:395–6.41 Thomas Dibdin, Five Miles Off; or, The Finger Post (London, 1806), 15–16.42 Hunt, Critical Essays, 100. 43 Ibid.




Colman also comments on state censorship, although his comments here are morepragmatic:

When Liberal Censure fills the judgment seat,We thank the hand that points, with gentle art,The wholesome lancet to some morbid part...

It is the critic, with his ‘hatchet’, together with his insistence on following classicalprecedents, whom Colman most deplores. Surely audiences wouldn’t flock tothe theatres every night if they were purveying the sort of ‘trash’ of which thecritics complain. In conclusion, Colman is clearly on the side of the actors andauthors:

And, while a laugh or cry is to be had,Authors and actors can’t be very bad.Oh! may this doctrine be allow’d tonight,And be a laugh—broad laugh—your chief delight.Look not with eyes of critical disdain,But favour me who strives to entertain! 44

Colman’s prologue is partly a mild attack on the censorship exercised by the LordChamberlain’s Office—somewhat ironically, insofar as he was later to becomeExaminer of Plays for that very office—but it could also be seen as a much strongerrebuke to more outspoken critics such as Hunt.45Eight years later, during the summer season of 1814, Liston and his wife were

performing at the Lyceum Theatre—also known as the English Opera House—inthe Strand. Harlequin Hoax was especially written for the company by ThomasDibdin and proved an enormous hit. It concerns the reading of a new, and not verygood, harlequinade, written by a persistent and pushy author, on whom Liston,Fanny Kelly, and their colleagues play a practical joke to teach him a lesson.Abundant in puns, the play is a satire on contemporary pantomime, while alsoproviding an opportunity for a peep behind the scenes, spectacle on a small scale,and a magnificent fireworks display. Much of the satire is directed at the harle-quinade, a form with which Dibdin had achieved many successes.When the play opens, Patch the author (played by Edward Knight) announces

he has written a pantomime for Mr Raymond, the manager. Raymond is notinterested, but Patch has already distributed the parts, inevitably to unsuitableperformers. When asked who is to play Harlequin, he is about to reply, whenListon is heard shouting off stage, ‘Oh, but if I do, I’ll be d—d.’ As soon as heenters, Liston’s first words are ‘Mr Raymond—I have the highest veneration for myemployers, a sincere regard for the welfare of their property, and no man could bemore gratefully devoted to the public; but I beg leave to say, with the highestrespect to you, Mr Manager, that if I play the part I’ll be d—d.’He adds that he has

44 Dibdin, Five Miles Off, 3.45 This may well be the Prologue to which Leigh Hunt refers when he writes ‘Mr Colman attacked

me in a prologue, which, by a curious chance, Fawcett spoke right in my teeth, the box I sat inhappening to be directly opposite him. I laughed at the prologue, and only looked upon Mr Colman asa great monkey pelting me with nuts, which I ate.’Quoted in Archer & Lowe, Dramatic Essays, p. xxvi.

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been too long on the stage ‘not to know that Harlequin is the worst part in apantomime—a thing of shreds and patches, without a single point to get applauseexcept when he jumps and that is always done by somebody else’.46Liston’s professional pique is, however, a pose. In a side-whisper he adds that the

actors are playing a hoax on the pretensions of Mr Patch. When the reading begins,Raymond undertakes Pantaloon and Patch the Clown. Thomas Dibdin builds intothe dialogue an acknowledgement of Liston’s popularity as a comic actor. Listonand Raymond pursue a piece of stage business that should end up with themstriking the Clown, but instead they strike each other. This amuses the prompter,who says he is laughing at Liston. Liston replies, ‘Very much obliged to you’, andthen addresses Raymond: ‘[B]ut, my dear sir, I beg ten thousand pardons; I fearI struck you rather forcibly.’ Raymond tells him not to worry—it is a liberty hetakes with his audience every night, to which Chatterly (the prompter) adds, ‘Andthen who can help laughing?’47As Harlequin, Liston is told he ought to black his face or wear a mask. He is

chagrined at this suggestion as the ladies will not be able to see his beautiful profile,another in-joke drawing on the grotesqueness of Liston’s features. Among his othertasks will be to get his head stuck in the lamp case of a street lamp. The lamplighteris to pour a gallon of oil down his throat and stick a lighted wick in his mouth.(This is very close to one of the stunts carried out by Grimaldi in a harlequinadeauthored by Thomas Dibdin.) Then a crowd of drunken bucks arrive and knockhis head to pieces, thinking they are breaking lamps. Liston’s indignation continuesto grow until he and Fanny Kelly finally put paid to Patch’s ambitions.Harlequin Hoax proved very successful. A light, good-humoured, satirical piece, it

was perfect summer theatre fare and drew audiences right up until the end of theseason. It presented popular actors, such as Liston and Fanny Kelly, in their everydaypersonas, enabling these performers to play theatricalized versions of themselves. It isunsurprising, perhaps, that Liston was praised for being ‘the main beam of thepiece’.48 And, once again, Thomas Dibdin proved that he could effectively parody agenre to which he had also contributed so many successful scripts.That authors were indebted to actors rather than vice-versa is made abundantly

clear in another piece by Thomas Dibdin, the comic opera Morning Noon andNight, performed at the Haymarket in 1822. Morris, the Haymarket manager, hadjust rejected Love Letters, a play by Thomas Dibdin, who began the new opera thatsame evening. It was submitted to Morris and Liston for approval.49 Dibdin refersin his Reminiscences to another occasion when he had to seek Liston’s approval ofone of his plays prior to Morris agreeing to perform it. ‘I read to Mr Liston, whilebreakfasting at his own house, all that related to his part,’ says Dibdin, ‘andregretting (I was going to say reprobating) the practice of always sending authorsfor him to sit in judgment on,—Mr Liston said he would play the part.’50 The plotis rather complicated and disconnected, although Dibdin had provided some good

46 Huntington Library, California, John Larpent Plays, 1814 MS.LA1824, Manuscript of ThomasDibdin, Harlequin Hoax; or, A Pantomime Proposed, ff. 6–7.

47 Ibid., f. 8. 48 News (21 August 1814). 49 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 2:236.50 Ibid., 2:277. In fact Liston did not play the part in question, as Morris turned down the play.




parts, such as Shark, a man with a guilty secret, played by Daniel Terry, andListon’s role, Lord Scribbleton, a man so foolish and self-important that he eveninsists his own father address him by his title rather than by his Christian name. Henot only reads bad verses and cheap romances, but also writes them, thus providingDibdin with an opportunity to satirize prevalent literary fashions and conventions.Lord Scribbleton bemoans the fact he lives in an unromantic country ‘uncursedwith caverns, barren of banditti, and where a man may travel from one end to theother of it, in the middle of the night, without seeing a single spectre’.51 His books,however, make up for this lack. They include The Deluded Wife, The DesertedChild, The Horrors of the Catacomb, The Murderous Muleteer, and The PetrifiedPilgrim, the proceeds of which he gives to charity. He also writes verse, a sample ofwhich is:

Peggy Webster was fairest of all that was fair,In the capital city of York,Her brother cut capers, her father cut hair,And her mother made hay with a fork.52

The summit of the satire is reached when Lord Scribbleton sings a comic song: ‘’Tisthe fashion romances to read, / ’Tis the fashion romances to write’.53 The songsatirizes all the machinery of Gothic horror: ladies dressed in white, bandits,vampires, robbers, ruins, wicked nuns, and prisoners. It became very popular andwas frequently encored.In the course of the play Lord Scribbleton sets out for an inn with his French

servant, Baptiste, to view incognito the woman to whom he has been promised inmarriage. Unfortunately, he stops at the wrong inn, from which arise a number ofcomic situations and misunderstandings. One traveller overhears him boasting ofhis ‘Exploits in the Forest’ and ‘Murder of an Infant Heiress’ and assumes he is abrigand, not an author. At the inn he is mistaken for a highwayman, wronglyapprehended on a charge of debt, and also mistaken for someone else’s husband.The comedy relies on the old theme of the would-be adventurer getting entangledin a whole series of adventures, without ever really grasping what is happening.Liston was much praised for his performance: ‘his sentimental coxcomb is anexquisite treat; there is a solemnity and deep feeling about his countenance whichis truly laughable’,54 wrote one commentator, while the Theatrical Observer, whichthought little of the play, conceded that Liston ‘contrives to throw in such looksand such attitudes, that the sketch is heightened to a very ludicrous pitch. Hisdirections to his servant Baptiste at the Bush Inn, to inspect his apartments, toascertain whether there are any trap-doors—any dead men in closets—or anypillows or bolsters stained with blood, and Liston’s mysterious air in entering theroom, after his romantic brain had supposed an adventure to be at hand, were trulyamusing.’55 It seems that, once again, the author has provided a sketch for the actor

51 Thomas Dibdin, Morning, Noon and Night; or, The Romance of a Day (London, 1822), 9.52 Ibid., 10. 53 Ibid., 26.54 Unidentified clipping, attached to Haymarket Playbill (9 September 1822).55 Theatrical Observer (11 September 1822).

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to develop, embody, and bring to life. While not providing Liston with any of hisgreatest roles, Thomas Dibdin still created parts tailored to his particular talents.

CONCLUSION

Thomas Dibdin’s career did not always progress smoothly. He was clearly acompetent stage manager and a prolific author, but he faced hostility inside aswell as outside the theatrical profession. He encountered particular difficulties inthe early 1820s when working for Robert William Elliston at Drury Lane andDavidMorris at the Haymarket: Elliston eventually sacked him as Drury Lane stagemanager; Morris regularly commissioned plays from Dibdin and then rejectedthem. Dibdin ascribes his difficulties to the influence of James Winston at boththeatres.56 Winston is certainly unsympathetic to Thomas Dibdin in his Diaries,criticizing the text of Dibdin’s The Chinese Sorcerer (1823), while praising itseffective staging.57 Henry Crabb Robinson, who saw this production on 16 April1823, seems to concur: ‘[T]he scenery was so beautiful that I actually cared nothingfor the execrable stuff of words by which it was accompanied.’58 On 29 AprilWinston recorded that:

T. J. Dibdin put up a notice in the Green [Room] requiring the performers in TheChinese Sorcerer not to speak more than was writ down for them. This they did literally,and the piece [went] off very dully—their jokes being the only ones in the piece. Theysent an answer to Dibdin nearly as follows—Mr Elliston gave the performers a carteblanche to say what they please as they could say nothing worse than what [he] hadgiven them. They would do that [which] would prevent the author sending them suchanother piece, it being beneath their talents, etc., etc.59

A few weeks later, on 17 May, Winston wrote that Dibdin ‘talked much abouthimself in the Green [Room]. Said he was next to Mr Colman and he should soonfind his proper place—not been treated well here . . .Twenty years ago Dibdin wasa great man at Covent Garden, etc., etc.’60 Even if Thomas Dibdin’s self-estimationas second only to Colman the Younger is questionable, it seems likely that he wascorrect in his assumption that Winston was hostile to his presence at both DruryLane and the Haymarket. As Michael Burden indicates in Chapter Three in thisvolume concerning the elder Charles Dibdin’s experiences at the Royal Circus,personality clashes and rivalry remained a continual thorn in the side of thetheatrical collaborator.Throughout his career Thomas Dibdin wrote a large number of serviceable

melodramas, comedies, operas, and pantomimes, providing roles that actors coulddevelop creatively and, throughHarlequin and Mother Goose, fostering the career of

56 Dibdin, Reminiscences, 2:281.57 Alfred L. Nelson and Gilbert B. Cross (eds), Selections from James Winston’s Diaries 1819–1827

(London: Society for Theatre Research, 1974), 65.58 Eluned Brown (ed.), The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the diary of Henry Crabb

Robinson (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), 101.59 Nelson and Cross, Diaries, 66. 60 Ibid., 67.




Joseph Grimaldi and seminal developments in English pantomime. As an author heendeavoured to supply theatres with the sort of plays they required and actors withparts that fitted them. In any non-literary history of the nineteenth-century theatrehe is and remains a significant figure, a far cry from Hunt’s ‘scribbler’ whose majorachievement had been to debase the taste of the town. A review of his Reminiscencesin the New Monthly Magazine provides a fairer assessment of his qualities:

Whatever estimate may be formed of his merits as a dramatic writer, the success ofmany of his pieces which still keep possession of the stage, entitle the life of the writerof two hundred plays to very respectful attention—especially when we consider thevery great effect which even the farce of a season has upon manners—the colouringwhich it gives to conversation and habits of expression—and the way in which thestage modifies the ordinary language and ordinary ideas of the numerous class ofpersons who frequent the theatres.61

The London Magazine takes the discussion further, responding in its review ofDibdin’s Reminiscences to the pressures he was under, often for reasons of profitrather than artistry, to rework his plays:

Not only is the character of the piece affected by the interested speculations of theplaywright, but in the process of manufacturing is greatly modified by those ofthe proprietor and performers. Mr. Dibdin’s pieces, in the course of reading andrehearsing, appear to have suffered innumerable alterations and additions, renderednecessary by the views of the proprietor, or the jealousy of actors. The dramatist seemsas often to have worked upon their suggestions, as to have been guided by any originalconceptions of his own. His business was to fit them with parts, and if the parts did notfit, the pieces were sent home to be altered.62

Like those of other contemporary playwrights, such as John Poole and WilliamThomas Moncrieff, Thomas Dibdin’s final years were poverty-stricken. In 1833 hededicated a publication entitled Last Lays of the Last of the Three Dibdins, containing150 new songs and poems and 150 selections from published and unpublishedproductions, to Edward Bulwer Lytton, praising his bill in favour of the rights ofdramatic authors.Had such a bill been passed thirty years earlier, claimedDibdin, ‘thewriter of this would, in his decline, have possessed a very considerable income’, whilehe lambasted all ‘those gentlemenmanagers, prompters, and copyists, whose assumedprerogatives, perquisites, and pilferings, by private sale and resale of his manuscripts,have, for years, monopolized all such profits exclusively for themselves’.63Thomas Dibdin represents the problems faced by playwrights in a period when the

dramatic text was not sacrosanct but merely one aspect of a collaborative approach tocreating performance. The text is the blueprint, not the finished article, and Dibdinwould have been keenly aware of this. Popular genres such as pantomime needed someform of text, but this was merely a template for a much more complex activityrequiring an input of skills and original ideas by a range of theatre workers.Melodramawas often formulaic and dependent on spectacular effects. Theatre was a commercial

61 New Monthly Magazine 19/1 (1827): 580. 62 London Magazine 8 (June, 1827): 230.63 Thomas Dibdin, Last Lays of the Last of the Three Dibdins (London, 1833), iii.

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enterprise driven by economic imperatives. While a dramatist might occasionallyreceive a large sum for a specific play, the rewards were often paltry compared withthe sums pocketed by management and leading actors. As John Russell Stephensindicates, ‘Dramatic authorship was never an easy profession and for much of thecentury provided neither security nor status.’64 Many dramatists learned their tradefrom direct involvement in the theatre as actors or stage managers, some were alsotheatre managers, and the majority were concerned to generate income rather thanliterary fame. The ultimate text was the performance, the success of which dependedon a favourable response from spectators. Thus the recognition for which Dibdin andhis fellow dramatists struggled was not related to the value of their texts in literaryterms, but to their value as a part of the collective endeavour to enable effective andcommercially successful theatrical productions.

64 John Russell Stephens, The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre 1800–1900 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.




11‘Each Song Was Just Like a Little Sermon’

Dibdin’s Victorian Afterlives

Isaac Land

The memory of Charles Dibdin flourished in the Victorian era. This went wellbeyond the occasional revival of his songs, and the entry of a few selected works intothe standard repertoire of national favourites. Sailors who wrote memoirs recordedhow their shipmates would ask for ‘a Dibdin’.1 The indefinite article suggested thatDibdin’s sea songs had been received as a whole genre unto themselves. As late as1853, the Illustrated London News did not know how to refer to their contempor-aries who penned sea songs and nautically themed plays except as ‘our Dibdins’.2Two decades later, a song appeared in Punch attributed to ‘the ghost of CharlesDibdin’.3 In the 1890s, Gerard Cobb was called ‘the Dibdin of the Army’ when heset Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads to music.4 There is at least one instanceof an adjective: ‘Dibdinish’.5In another measure of the enduring affection for Dibdin, festivals were held to

raise funds for a statue of the composer at Greenwich. This marked an importanttransition point in the process of repackaging Dibdin as primarily a loyalistsongwriter on naval themes, although as Cox Jensen points out in Chapter Sevenof this volume, these were hardly representative of his overall output, and even inthis narrow arena, he had many competitors in his lifetime. Some enthusiastssigned the subscription lists with appropriate pseudonyms such as ‘Black Ey’dSusan’ and ‘A Lass who loved a Sailor’. ‘A Jack Tar, all his Rhino but me at anend’ gave £1 1s. to the monument fund (‘rhino’ being a term for money that wouldhave been familiar to admirers of Dibdin lyrics).6 Beginning in 1841, the Handelenthusiast and professional opera singer Henry Phillips (1801–76) sent out a seriesof calls for reminiscences and appreciations of Dibdin.7 Dozens of responses survive

1 Land, War, 112–15.2 ‘Sketches of Stage Favourites: Mr. T. P. Cooke’, Illustrated London News (15 October 1853): 319.3 Punch (11 December 1875): 240. 4 Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 172.5 Punch (24 September 1892).6 Subscription list, ‘National Monument to the Memory of the Late Charles Dibdin’, Harvard

Theater Collection MS Thr 198, box 3 (hereafter HTC).7 Henry Phillips, Musical and Personal Recollections during Half a Century, 2 vols (London, 1864)

(hereafter Phillips) is valuable; his project to collect the testimonials is discussed in 2:12–20. Phillips’smaterials and correspondence from the 1840s revival wound up in the HTC.



in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Several correspondents remark on Phillips’sown role as a keeper of the flame, both as a skilled performer of Dibdin’s works andas an advocate for seeing a complete, official version of the Dibdin corpus intoprint. The Songs of Charles Dibdin, a two-volume compilation that first appeared in1842, contains an expression of gratitude for Phillips’s help. Some of thereminiscences—in handwriting shaky with age or infirmity—are from ordinarypeople who had heard Dibdin perform when they were children. One was eventaken backstage to meet the great man. Others, in a more analytical spirit, discusshow his songs helped win the war, a theme that has been revived by modernscholars of patriotic music and theatre.8 Charles Taylor wrote, ‘Certainly no writerof that day contributed so much to the good of his country—Each song, was aSermon, for the simple beauty of his language was such, that it could not fail toexcite all minds to admiration, and accompanied by his touching composition hadmore affect [sic] upon the Navy, than any arguments set forth from the Pulpit.’9In this chapter, I consider Dibdin’s Victorian afterlives under three different

headings, each prompted by a question. First, how did the Victorians squareDibdin’s questionable personal life and somewhat rough-hewn language withtheir expectations of moral uplift? Second, what did it mean to present Dibdin asan object of reverence and serious study? If he was an English ‘bard’, a ‘genius’, andone of the defining landmarks in the culture of the Napoleonic era, how would thisshape the publication and performance of his works in the Victorian period? Andthird, how did nostalgia for the era of wooden warships trigger a fresh wave ofDibdin appreciation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century? All of theseenquiries shed light on Cox Jensen’s contention that the capacity of Dibdin’s songs‘to assimilate change demonstrates [their] inherent versatility’.10

MUSIC AND MORALS

Asked, in the final year of his life, to contribute something for a concert in honourof his father, Thomas Dibdin penned a somewhat strained rewrite of ‘Poor Jack’:

To him, who ne’er yet breathed a line which YouMight not approve; and this fact was his pride!His Harp’s speaking melody ne’er owned the strainWhich could poison convey to the ear,Make semblance of pleasure a passport to pain,Or caused ruin’d beauty a tear;

8 Jim Davis, ‘British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant: Images of the British Navy in NauticalMelodrama’, New Theatre Quarterly 4 (1988): 122–43; Jacky Bratton, Acts of Supremacy: The BritishEmpire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). I have discussedthis from a somewhat different angle in Land, War, 77–104.

9 HTC: Charles Taylor, 12 August 1842. On the issue of sermonizing and proper tone, see alsoCox Jensen, Chapter Seven of this volume.

10 Chapter Seven of this volume, 133.




If mirth and sound moral commingled may claimRecollection, his Muse ne’er will LackThe wreath of True Genius, which justly-earn’d FameShall entwine for the Bard of ‘Poor Jack’.11

Thomas Dibdin’s tone seems slightly defensive—who was suggesting that hisfather’s lyrics might convey poison to the ear? As early as the 1840s, what mightbe called theMusic and Morals question—after the influential 1871 volume by Rev.H. R. Haweis—hampered supporters’ efforts to elevate Dibdin to a canonicalposition. Haweis sums up an attitude that was already widespread in someVictorian circles when he denies that the ideal composer was necessarily an unbridledspirit: ‘His profession, rightly exercised, does not lead to the unbalanced excitementof sensuous emotions . . . but to the orderly education and discipline of emotion,which is a very different thing.’12 In this vein, Haweis instructs his readers that‘Beethoven was not only severely moral and deeply religious, but . . . his ideal of artwas the highest’, and even Mozart ‘was a man of the most singularly well-balancedcharacter’.13This was not a standard that Dibdin could live up to, unless (as, perhaps, in the

case of Mozart) one were willing to take liberties with the biographical evidence. Ina sketch that bears on David Kennerley’s argument in Chapter Five of this volume,George Hogarth conceded that ‘Dibdin may be added to the numerous illustrationsof the maxim, that the character of an author is not to be gathered from his works.In the nearest and dearest relations of life, his conduct was at total variance with thesentiments to which he was in the daily habit of giving expression.’14 However,he denied that there was anything insincere about Dibdin’s songs, which formedthe strongest evidence of the composer’s noble core beneath the tarnished exterior.‘That the principles of religion and morality existed in his mind, and that he was ofa kindly and benevolent nature, cannot be doubted. These features are stampedupon his works in characters not to be mistaken. Language so full of truth andnature, and so evidently the outpouring of the heart, could never have been dictatedby hypocrisy, or the mere conventionality of authorship.’15 In a letter to HenryPhillips, Edward Taylor, who taught music at Gresham College, also defendedDibdin against the charge of hypocrisy:

I remember Dibdin; and I never shall forget the extraordinary effect that he producedwith a very scanty and not very attractive voice, nor how completely he identifiedhimself with any sentiment to which he gave utterance, so that it seemed like thespontaneous overflow of a kind and generous heart aided by a vivid imagination, than aprepared and got up performance . . . if some of our modern so-called song writerswould endeavour to take a leaf out of his book, and remember that the first and chiefingredient in a song is its melody, their compositions would be a little more palatablethan they are. [Here he addresses Phillips directly:] You know, for you have oftenproved, the effect of Dibdin’s melodies, when, unsupported by accompaniment of any

11 HTC. 12 Hugh Reginald Haweis, Music and Morals (4th edn, London, 1873), 87.13 Ibid., 91, 92. 14 Hogarth, 1:xxviii. 15 Ibid., 1:xvii.

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sort, they have made their appeal to the sympathy of an audience, and you know thatthe appeal is seldom if ever made in vain.16

Like Hogarth, Taylor (echoing Wordsworth’s famous description of poetry as the‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’) represents Dibdin’s songs as anoutpouring or effusion of the composer’s authentic inner spirit, rather than amanipulative tugging at the listener’s heartstrings. Similarly (in another echo ofKennerley’s chapter), a rumour circulated that Dibdin had lost his pension becausehe had criticized the government’s treatment of veterans. Hogarth was aware of thisstory, but dismissed it as apocryphal.17 Yet it resurfaced in the 1880s, suggestingthat the story fulfilled a need: if Dibdin could not represent virtue in one sense,perhaps he could in another, showing courage on behalf of the very sailors lionizedin his songs.18Setting aside the question of the composer’s personal and indeed public life, the

tone and vocabulary of his lyrics also worried some Victorians. The HampshireAdvertiser acknowledged that, while forceful, these often verged on the unaccept-able: ‘His most successful painting is done by very broad handling, a thick brush,and a coarse touch.’19 Hogarth, introducing the compilation of 1842, figured thispositively, writing that Dibdin’s sea songs were ‘bold and masculine, without theslightest rudeness or vulgarity; and they hence afford delight to the simplest as wellas to the most cultivated taste’.20 An undated newspaper clipping preserved inPhillips’s papers entitled ‘The Songs of Charles Dibdin’ addressed the charge thatDibdin’s lyrics were too ‘low’ for polite consumption:

Never concealing, and sometimes half-justifying or extenuating the irregularities ofthe classes whom he chiefly addressed, the whole tendency of his songs is tostrengthen in the homeliest and the least obtrusive manner, the peculiar virtues oftheir station—honour, valour, mercy, friendship, and virtuous love; while inciden-tally, and without the remotest attempt at teaching, the ill consequences of anopposite conduct are shown.

The author goes on to quote a writer in the Harmonicon from 1824, who stated,‘Had Dibdin written merely to amuse, his reputation would have been great, but itstands the higher because it is always on the side of virtue.’ Interestingly, thinkingespecially perhaps of songs such as ‘True Courage’, the later essayist takes this a stepfurther by remarking on Dibdin as a nobly restrained war poet: ‘[T]hough Dibdinwas a man of his age . . . yet it was a great merit, that in a period of unusualexcitement, he cheered its followers on as brave, but humane men; as performinga duty to their country, not as gratifying any vindictive passion of their own.’In a letter to Phillips, one H. Bellamy wrote that ‘his [Dibdin’s] works taken

altogether form such a compendium of morality and good feeling as can scarcely beequalled by any other contributor to the lyric art’.21 This was a step beyond praisinghis earnest, unaffected style. Was Dibdin being presented as the analogue of

16 HTC: Letter from Edward Taylor, 8 December 1841. 17 Hogarth, 1:xxv.18 Musical World 69 (3 August 1889). 19 Hampshire Advertiser (5 September 1863).20 Hogarth, 1:xxxii. 21 HTC: Letter from H. Bellamy, 30 November 1841.




Hannah More, whose Cheap Repository Tracts had preached against revolution inthe 1790s, or perhaps as the progenitor of what Derek Scott has called ‘improvingballads’?22 If so, it would have been an ironic fate for the man condemned by Moreand her colleague Gilpin for his ‘loose, profane, and corrupt’ verse, and who—asCox Jensen has shown in this volume—was second-guessed even by contemporaryadmirers for his slang and irreverent language.23Dibdin’s choice of words remained objectionable to some Victorian ears. In his

autobiography, Phillips observes that Dibdin enthusiasts often bowdlerized the verysongs that they praised. In ‘Poor Jack’ the line ‘Why, what a damn’d fool you mustbe!’ became ‘Why, what a great fool you must be!’ In ‘Wapping Old Stairs’ theVictorians replaced a reference to ‘trousers’ with ‘waistcoat’.24 Phillips chastised such‘refined’ and ‘prudish’ vocalists, but it would be a losing battle; according to Scott, bythe 1870s, Dibdin had become too lively and vulgar for the drawing room.25O. F. Routh had a different solution, retaining Dibdin’s music but jettisoning thelyrics entirely. HisTemperance Dibdin, a collection of twenty songs that sold for eightpence, was advertised with the claim that it transformed ‘this priest of Bacchus intothe apostle of temperance’.26Victorians who relished Dibdin’s lyrics and wished to retain them liked to

argue that a missionary was entitled to adopt mannerisms and language thatwould work best with his intended audience. When speaking to sailors, it madesense to couch one’s remarks in terms of nautical bravado. This suggests acomparison to the Bethel Movement, a nineteenth-century missionary endeavourthat refurbished old ships into floating chapels in various harbours, and encour-aged sailors who had turned to religion to preach to their fallen brethren in alanguage that they would understand.27 Hogarth best articulated this position.He argued that Dibdin, through his intuitive grasp of their nature, had inspiredsailors to be their best selves:

Dibdin’s pictures of the sailor’s character, and the sailor’s life, though highly colouredand embellished, are true to reality in their essential features . . . It is the embellishedtruth of Dibdin’s pictures which has made them act so powerfully on the class theyrepresent. Were they coarse and literal copies, the originals would turn away in angerand disgust, from a looking-glass which reflected their deformities with so unpleasing afidelity. Were they mere fancy-pieces, they would be neither understood nor cared for.In the Jack Ratlin or Tom Bowling of Dibdin, the sailor recognizes a brother-sailor—abeing like himself, but nobler and better than himself, whom he would gladly resemblemore fully, while [sic] he feels himself capable of doing so . . .That this is no imaginarypicture has been vouched [for] by those who are most conversant with nautical life.

22 Dibdin is much discussed in Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad and Scott, The SingingBourgeois. For ‘improving ballads’, see Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 137.

23 Hannah More, The Two Shoemakers. In Six Parts (London, c.1800), 88 fn.24 Phillips, 2:17–18. 25 Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 158, 172.26 Musical World (2 March 1872): 146.27 Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions: Their Origins and Early Growth (Pasadena, CA: William

Carey Library, 1986).

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They have a thousand times borne testimony to the fact, that these happy effects on thecharacter of the British sailor have been mainly caused by the Songs of Dibdin.28

A different approach to Hogarth’s point may involve a reappraisal of the greatmajority of Dibdin listeners who were not sailors at all. We might conclude thatDibdin offered a sentimental and unchallenging version of plebeian life—but hadhis songs been entirely respectable, would they have been as exciting, as charming,or as popular? Raymond Williams’s remark that Charles Dickens was the charac-teristic novelist of the overheard snatch of speech on the metropolitan street is ofinterest here.29 Dickens’s occasional use of a Dibdin lyric showed an awareness of,and perhaps an affinity for, the songwriter. It would be difficult to sustain a point-by-point comparison between the two authors, but within the constraints of hisgenre, Dibdin is remembered, above all, for having given a voice to certain kinds ofmarginal characters. If, as a moralist, his tastes ran to the saccharine, the affectionfor his diamond-in-the-rough characters would not have endured if the ‘rough’ hadnot contained a little genuine grit.

TAKING DIBDIN SERIOUSLY

In 1841, Dickens’s illustrator, George Cruikshank, supplied the pictures to go withThomas Dibdin’s compilation Songs Naval and National of the late Charles Dibdin.The following year, G. H. Davidson published the more ambitious and compre-hensive Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged with Notes, Historical,Biographical, and Critical; and the Music of the Best and Most Popular of the Melodies,with New Piano-Forte Accompaniments, beginning with a long, appreciative intro-duction by Hogarth. Pairing Dibdin with the illustrator of Oliver Twist showedsome insight into the personalities and aptitudes of both men; but the Davidsonvolumes (dedicated to Prince Albert) adopt an altogether loftier tone, supplyingmassive footnotes to gloss every historical event mentioned in the songs. Thisfootnoting project creates a number of incongruous moments, reaching a height ofabsurdity when a slight and generic patriotic piece, ‘The Battle of Corunna’, isreproached for quite overlooking the fact that Corunna had been a defeat. Thefootnote quotes at length from battle dispatches and even cites scholarly volumessuch as Napier’s History of the Peninsular War. This unlikely essay is far longer thanthe song, nearly crowding Dibdin’s lyric off the page. This leads to a bizarrejuxtaposition on page 421, where the dense historical narrative continues, toppedby the next song, one of Dibdin’s most frivolous pieces, ‘Pomposo’.30What is at work here? It is unclear who supplied the footnotes, although the note

to ‘The Preservation of the Braganzas’, another hastily improvised patriotic piececelebrating the successful escape of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, offers a

28 Hogarth, 1:xxx–xxxi.29 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto &Windus, 1973). For Dibdin’s

ventriloquizing of ‘typical’ voices, see also Harriet Guest in Chapter Eight of this volume, 138–41.30 Hogarth, 2:418–22.




hint of the vision behind the project. The long gloss begins, ‘The events referred toare altogether of so remarkable a character, that we think we shall be pardoned,particularly by our younger readers, if we notice them at some length.’31 Given thatDibdin did not go in for detailed narratives—this was scarcely ‘The Midnight Rideof Paul Revere’—it is hard to imagine young readers using Dibdin as a schoolbook.The notes continue to fault him for his inadequacies as an educator, however, fact-checking a song entitled ‘Naval Victories’, mercilessly enumerating all of Dibdin’shistorical errors. The note concludes, ‘[I]f the song has little merit as a piece ofchronology, it has still less as poetry.’32 This marks a sharp departure from the toneset by Hogarth’s preface at the beginning of the first volume, which labels Dibdin a‘genius’.33 Hogarth also deploys the term ‘bard’, showing that—for him, at least—the word was not merely a fancy synonym for poet or songwriter, but a deliberateevocation of the ancient world: ‘Dibdin united in his own person the characteristicsof the bards of the olden time. He gave to the world, through the medium of hisown recitations, his own poetry and his own music. In modern days he is absolutelywithout a parallel.’34 Robert Burns, by this definition, is explicitly of a lesser statusthan Dibdin, as he had written poetry, but not the music to go with it.As inconsistent (or incoherent) as the Davidson volumes are, they belong to a

trend of the 1840s: Dibdin is presented as serious, edifying, and uplifting. Even theirate footnotes to the Davidson edition suggest that Dibdin was now expected toserve a higher purpose than that of a mere composer of toe-tapping ditties. Thisprocess may also be seen in the way that Dibdin was performed. Phillips boastedthat he rendered the lyrics and the notes exactly as the master had written them,remarking in his autobiography that he ‘sang as near the manner of Dibdin, as anyone I believe since his time, having been taught to do so by my mother, who knewhim intimately’.35 Only a philistine would sing a Dibdin song as a round, makingthe lyrics hard to hear, and losing the conversational tone of the original. At theHanover Square Rooms on 2 March 1844, Phillips offered ‘An Hour with Dibdinand a Miscellaneous Act’. A promotional poster, reproduced in Figure 11.1, showsthese words emblazoned against a colourful Union Jack backdrop. The ‘Hourwith Dibdin’ was a benefit concert for the Shipwrecked Fishermen and MarinersBenevolent Society. The Hanover Square Rooms were often used for prestigiouscharity events, for example on behalf of refugees displaced by political unrest on theContinent, at times with royalty and society figures in attendance.36 Admission tothe ‘Hour with Dibdin’ would be 2s. 6d., or 3s. 6d. for a reserved seat.What sort of person might turn up at the Hanover Square Rooms at half past

eight on a Saturday evening? A stone’s throw from Regent Street and Oxford Street,Hanover Square was London’s bastion of serious concert going. Its habitués likedto contrast their serious interest in music against both the crudity of the popular

31 Ibid., 2:369–71, quoted 369. 32 Ibid., 2:229–30.33 Ibid., 1:xv. For the term ‘genius’, see also Musical World 62 (20 September 1884): 596.34 Hogarth, 1:xxix. 35 Phillips, 2:17.36 Frank K. Prochaska, ‘Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies

16 (1977): 62–84.

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Figure 11.1. Promotional poster for An Hour with Dibdin and a Miscellaneous Act. London,1844. Hand-coloured engraving. MS Thr 1981 43-144, Houghton Library, HarvardUniversity.




performance halls and the empty virtuosity of the aristocratic salons. ChristinaBashford has written of the emergence of ‘concentrated listening and a generalseriousness of purpose’ in the 1830s and 1840s.37 Some performances had analmost academic aspect, as the audience brought a score to follow. A semi-circularseating arrangement enabled a ‘music so nicely delicate in all its parts’ to reach theears of all the ticketholders.38 Liszt, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn would perform therein the 1840s. While it is true that the cultural politics of what counted as ‘classicalmusic’ remained somewhat uncertain in this period—the term itself was onlybeginning to emerge—it is fair to say that Dibdin’s songs were never performedin such an atmosphere in his lifetime.39On 2March, the evening’s programme was as shown in Table 11.1. Between the

parts, a ‘Mr. T. Wright will perform a fantasia on the harp’.Some reviewers remarked simply that the programme showed Phillips’s versatility.

Cross-referencing the songs in the ‘Miscellaneous Act’ with his autobiographyreveals that two of the songs in Part Two had been turning points in Phillips’sown career. ‘The Last Man’ had been written expressly for him to perform—a signthat he had arrived as a singer—and when he sang ‘The Light of Other Days’ inBalfe’s opera The Maid of Artois (1836), the audience demanded no fewer thanthree encores.40 Yet a closer look at this programme shows a coherent vision and aprocess of selection that went beyond personal favourites or crowd-pleasers. Mostobviously, all but one of the Dibdin pieces were sea songs. Part One is nostalgic on atleast two levels: for Dibdin’s era in London life, but also for Nelson’s sailors just asthe age of steam threatens to displace them—and they are dying off. Yet positioningDibdin as of his time, a quaint period piece, is not the complete story. There are alsothe resonances between Parts One and Two.Phillips’s ‘Miscellaneous Act’ begins with ‘The Last Man’, a solemn song about

the apocalypse:

The Sun’s eye had a sickly glare,The Earth with age was wan,The skeletons of Nations wereAround that lonely man!

Today, this song seems to have disappeared into the obscurity from whence itcame. However, Phillips’s programme notes draw attention to the singular, sublimequalities of ‘The Last Man’, its originality, and the ‘rank’ it holds among Englishcompositions. Opening Part Two with this piece placed Dibdin in rarefied com-pany. Phillips followed the apocalypse with some comic relief in the form of ‘MollyBawn’, replete with Irish-isms. (It first appeared in the comic operetta A PaddyWhack in Italia.) The bold young lover Rory O’Moore presses on:

37 Christina Bashford, ‘Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in Early VictorianLondon’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999): 25–51, 28.

38 Ibid., 34.39 Derek B. Scott, ‘Music and Social Class in Victorian London’, Urban History 29 (2002): 60–73.40 Phillips, 1:217–18, 229–30, 279; 2:39.

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The pretty girls were made for the boys, dear,And may be you were made for mine.

The third song returns the tone to a deathly solemnity:

The very Ivy on the ruin,In gloom full life displays;But the heart alone sees no renewing,The light of other days.

Table 11.1 An Hour with Dibdin and a Miscellaneous Act concert programme, HanoverSquare Rooms, 2 March 1844.

Part One Part Two

Introductory Observations.—The Life of CharlesDibdin; the character of his melodies; his firstproductions, &c.

Campbell’s Poem of the last Man—itssublimity—the singular and original Music towhich it is set—the rank it holds in Englishcomposition.

Song . . . ‘Poor Jack’ Scena.—‘The Last Man’ . . .W. H. Callcott

The various lights of the present age; the streets ofLondon in former times; Garrick and hisSedan chair; the Gas-man compared with theLamplighter; Dr. Kitchener: the very ingeniousSymphony to Ballad . . . ‘I’m Jolly Dick theLamplighter’

Curious dialogue between two Hibernians—anidea of an interim reason for not going up in aballoon with a father-in-law.

Ballad.—‘Molly Bawn’ . . . S. Lover

Charles Dibdin’s incentive to composing ‘TomBowling’; description of a burial at sea.

First rehearsal of the ‘Maid of Artois’—contention of Madame Malibran for ‘TheLight of other Days’—Mr. Phillips’ ultimatesuccess in obtaining it—Madame M.’s revengeupon the carpenters.

Song . . . ‘Tom Bowling’ Recitative & Air—‘The Light of OtherDays’ . . .Balfe

Description of Greenwich Hospital and itsinmates; their peculiar mode of dress, andmanner of decorating their rooms.

The Germans’ seasons for hilarity—the great tunof Heidelberg—Dr. Aldrich’s reasons—thegreat inefficiency of translations in general.

Song . . . ‘The Greenwich Pensioner’ Trink Leid . . . ‘Em Herbst Da Muss, man,trinken’

The Seaman’s nectar; mess on board a man-of-war; Admiral Nelson at Portsmouth; the neplus ultra of a seaman’s delight.

Character of a seaman—his firm nerve, contrastedwith the landsman’s—general feeling andreliance on providence.

Air . . . ‘The Can of Grog’ Song.—‘The Pilot’ . . . S. Nelson

The parting of the sailor; the night arriving; hisabsence, and eventual return to his nativecountry.

Robin Hood—his various abodes—MaidMarian—his title—the outlaw’s character—Little John—Friar Tuck, &c. &c.—RobinHood’s extraordinary death—the situation ofhis grave—why placed there.

Air . . . ‘T’was Post Meridian’ Song.—‘Robin Hood’ . . .Bishop Percy’s Relics




The composer of ‘The Light of Other Days’ was Balfe, who would soon have manyparlour or drawing room favourites to his credit, such as his setting of Tennyson’s‘Come into the Garden, Maud’.It is worth considering how the various songs in the supposedly miscellaneous

Part Two worked to situate Dibdin, complement him, or show off his bestqualities. The lighter songs in Part Two are frivolous in the extreme. ‘MollyBawn’ is lusty without any ennobling challenge such as self-sacrifice or a longseparation. The German drinking song celebrates drinking in the absence ofany context. By contrast, Dibdin’s ‘The Can of Grog’ engages directly with graceunder pressure:

Blest with a smiling can of grog,If duty call,Stand, rise, or fall,To fate’s last verge he’ll jog.

If empire was a test of character, drinking helped sailors rise to that challenge:

For while the grog goes round,All sense of danger drown’d,We despise it to a man.

Meanwhile, the exceptionally grim, religious, and melancholy pieces in Part Twobrought out and emphasized Dibdin’s stanzas that evoked storm, strife, religiousthoughts, and the afterlife.What of the Union Jack plastered across the concert programme? The inclusion

of ‘Robin Hood’ to close Part Two harks back to another of Phillips’s greatpreoccupations, the lack of appreciation of English musical traditions. In hisautobiography, he inveighs against the ‘brainless prejudice’ in favour of Germanor Italian composers and singers. Phillips felt that it was time to raise the ‘nationalmusical flag’, even if his friends on the Continent might jibe that English musicconsisted of nothing but ‘roast beef and guineas’. The final project discussed in hisautobiography was his role in founding the English Glee and Madrigal Union.41When he critiqued the overuse of German musical styles and fashions in his ownday, Phillips remarked, ‘Fancy the naval songs of Charles Dibdin in such extrane-ous keys.’42After his performance at the Hanover Square Rooms, Phillips took ‘An Hour

with Dibdin’ on a long tour of the United States. This turned out to have been anunfortunate business decision. The publisher of Dibdin’s songs in the US hadpersuaded him that a market existed for this sort of entertainment, but New YorkCity audiences were puzzled and even offended by what sounded to them like agratuitously anti-American concert programme. Phillips made no new friends byrefusing to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, explaining to anyone who would listen

41 Ibid., 1:221; 2:209, 277–9.42 Ibid., 1:172; see also Musical World (20 September 1884): 596.

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that the tune was not of American origin.43 Insisting upon Dibdin’s veneration as anational bard made him difficult to repackage as a cultural export.

DIBDIN ’S GHOST IN THE AGE OF IRONCLADS

In 1864, reflecting on the collection of first-hand testimonials that he had assembledtwo decades earlier, Phillips offered this surprising summation:

These letters . . . are at once an evidence how universally Dibdin was admired, andhow, both as a melodist and poet, we may consider him such as we may never meetwith again; for, the mode of naval warfare being so altered, there is not the sameincentive to such themes; and I much fear that the national character may also losemuch of its freshness under existing circumstances. An English sailor does not likeskulking behind iron plates, or delight in the sinking of an enemy’s ship, withoutdaring to show his face. His delight is to look steadily at his foe, to rush at him, conquerhim, and tug him bound and humbled into harbour. The new mode of fighting willnever create another Dibdin.44

Just how Dibdin, who never fought a battle in his life and hardly ever went to sea,was himself the expression of ‘a mode of fighting’ is not explained.45It is not, perhaps, surprising that a professional singer would think of songs as

especially important expressions of the spirit of an age. But these sentiments aboutDibdin were not unique to Phillips. In 1875, Punch ran a satirical poem, ‘You mustnot speak to the man at the wheel’, deriding a botched Admiralty investigation intoan accident involving ironclad warships. The title referred to a standard warningmessage posted aboard steam-powered vessels and echoed common anxieties of theperiod about self-propelled devices and high-speed collisions, such as with out-of-control locomotives.46 The poem is subtitled ‘A new Sea Song, by the Ghost ofCharles Dibdin’ and plays up the dissonance between Britain’s nautical past andpresent with lines such as ‘’Twas “Shiver my timbers!” once, my mates; / This timeit came to “Shiver my plates!”’ One stanza evokes Dibdin’s lyrics explicitly:

For the sweet little Cherub that sits up aloft—If Cherubs e’er swear, he must do it oft—Poor JACK should pray for a smart engineer,And a kettle of steam that will swim and steer.Once a sink, or a smash, or a sudden capsizeWould have made old salts make free with their eyes;But now civility outdoes zeal,And we never swear at the Man at the Wheel.47

43 Phillips, 2:110–15. 44 Ibid., 2:16–17.45 For anxieties about technological change and its impact on national character, see also Land,

War, 131–58.46 Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2001).47 Punch (11 December 1875): 240.




Like Phillips, Punch emphasizes the impersonal, technocratic nature of the con-temporary ironclad navy. As Kennerley has demonstrated in Chapter Five of thisvolume, Dibdin contested the terrain of ‘manly independence’; would this cold,metallic environment make expressions of that ideal all but impossible in practice?Ships were no longer even ships, but ‘kettles of steam’, leaving sailors no longer incharge, but at the mercy of ‘a smart engineer’. Who would weep at the loss of such amechanical monstrosity?By contrast, the 1892 sale of the historic HMS Foudroyant for scrap elicited an

outpouring of anger, bewilderment, and regret. In January, the coal magnateGeoffreyWheatley Cobb (1859–1932)made a public appeal to save theFoudroyant.48Hewrote inThe Times, ‘A sailing three-decker, is, however as much a relic of a past ageas a mediaeval castle, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildingsmight doworse than extend its operations to such ships . . . and endeavour to preserve themfromwanton destruction.’49 In the previous year, an elaborate and expensivemodel ofHMS Victory had been displayed at the Royal Naval Exhibition in Chelsea. Cobbstressed that the Foudroyant was the real thing, equating the preservation of authenticnaval heritage with the preservation of authentic manhood:

It is safe to affirm that 20 years hence not one of the ships built within the first decadeof this century will be in existence unless steps are taken for their preservation . . . It isdifficult to believe that there is a single Englishman or boy to whom it would notappeal irresistibly; there is surely no one to whom it would not be at least as attractive asa Watkin tower or a papier-mâche Victory with a group of wax dolls in its cockpit.

Mere ‘wax dolls’ could never substitute for real sailors, real boys, real men. Cobbargues that an open-air exhibit represented a viable alternative to selling the oldships for scrap: ‘[I]f half a dozen of them were brought together in PortsmouthHarbour, they would form a naval museum of such interest as to be, in a measure atleast, self-supporting.’Cobb continued to lead the charge on this issue from January to September, with

added urgency as the Foudroyant was now docked in a Baltic port, where itsGerman buyer would soon dismantle it and sell the wood for kindling. He offeredto part with it, however, for £5,500.50 The imminent prospect of losing the ship forgood prompted a wave of concern. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a poem about it, andthroughout September, newspapers across England, Wales, and Scotland ran newsupdates, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor about the fate of the old woodenwarship on an almost daily basis.In Dundee, the Evening Telegraph ran a summary of the plans to save the

Foudroyant under the evocative headline ‘A Lesson in Patriotism’.51 Nelson’sflagship at Trafalgar, the Victory, had already been preserved as a piece of naval

48 Andrew Lambert, Trincomalee: The Last of Nelson’s Frigates (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute,2002), 109.

49 The Times (7 January 1892).50 Geoffrey Wheatley Cobb, ‘The End of One of Nelson’s Flagships’, The Times (2 September

1892).51 Evening Telegraph (Dundee, 12 September 1892).

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heritage, but articles noted that the Foudroyant, too, had an intimate connectionwith the admiral. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle observed that itwas ‘except the Victory, the only ship now remaining of these in which Lord Nelsonserved and which bore his flag’,52 while the Nottingham Evening Post elaborated onthe Foudroyant’s relationship to some of Britain’s finest naval victories: ‘Nelsonselected her as his flagship, but she was not ready in time or she would have bornehis flag at the Battle of the Nile. Subsequently, however, she was present in AboukirBay.’53 The Illustrated London News ran a photograph of the Foudroyant andremarked that the story of its sale for scrap ‘reads like a malicious fantasy of aParisian journalist who wants to have a fling at “the nation of shopkeepers”’. Thewooden warship should have been honoured as a survivor of ‘the historic singlecombats which belong to that Homeric period of our naval annals’.54References to Nelson were only to be expected, but the other name repeatedly

mentioned in coverage of the Foudroyant was Dibdin’s. The Penny IllustratedPaper wrote:

In the old sea-songs that were popular among our patriotic ancestors, such as Dibdin’sand others, the most endearing expressions of affection were applied to notable fightingvessels which had helped to win for our country its trophies of naval renown. Why is aship called ‘she,’ if not because the sailor regards it as a living personality, not less dearand venerable than his own grandmother, a floating deputy-Brittania [sic], an artificialgoddess of war and the waves? That feeling, however, seems to have died out in thisgeneration; at least, it is not now shared by the civilian officials at Whitehall.55

The Illustrated London News, without mentioning Dibdin by name, managed toevoke Nelson, manly Jack Tars, and the characteristic lyrics of the Ocean Bardtogether in a single paragraph:

What his men thought of [Nelson] is expressed in the rude but eloquent homage of theletter some of them wrote when he was quitting the ship . . .What would these men sayif they could come back to earth to find the vessel which was the flag-ship of their herosold to foreigners for firewood? Their language would not be decorous, but it wouldexpress a thoroughly English sentiment with equal truth and vigour.56

Much as ‘You must not speak to the man at the wheel’ had mocked an age ofcowardly ‘civility’ and mismanagement by assuming the voice of Dibdin’s ghost toreproach the Admiralty, so the Illustrated London News revived the Foudroyant’slong-dead crew to upbraid the ship-sellers, using—of course—the ‘rude but elo-quent’ phrasing associated with Dibdin’s songs. Through such juxtapositions, thesale of the Foudroyant became a betrayal of Nelson, Nelson’s crews, and Dibdin.

52 Hampshire Telegraph, and Sussex Chronicle (3 September 1892).53 ‘Metropolitan Notes’, Nottingham Evening Post (3 September 1892).54 Illustrated London News (17 September 1892).55 ‘One of Nelson’s Old Flag-ships’, Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (17 September

1892). For another Dibdin reference, see ‘A Famous Battleship’, Newcastle Weekly Courant(19 November 1892).

56 Illustrated London News (17 September 1892).




The longest evocation of Dibdin during the controversy was a poem ‘TheFighting Foudroyant’. The title recalls Turner’s painting The Fighting Temeraire,yet it is Dibdin, not Turner, who is named in almost every stanza:

‘Mayhap you have heard, that as dear as their lives,All true-hearted Tars love their ships and their wives.’So Dibdin declared, and he spoke for the Tar;He knew Jack so well, both in peace and in war!But hang it! times change, and ’tis sad to relate,The old Dibdinish morals seem quite out of date;Stick close to your ship, lads, like pitch till you die?—That sounds nonsense to-day, I’ll tell ye for why.57

By December, the Foudroyant would be repurchased and back in British waters,preserving the ‘old Dibdinish morals’ in its timbers for a new generation.58 Thebuyer, Cobb, did not turn it into a museum ship like the Victory after all. Instead,he set it up as a training vessel where destitute boys could be set on a path to a navalcareer. When a gale off Blackpool in 1897—just five years later—wrecked theFoudroyant beyond hope of repair, Cobb purchased two other Nelson-era woodenwarships, the Trincomalee and the Implacable, for the same purpose. Out ofstubbornness, perhaps, he renamed the first of these the Foudroyant. This educa-tional work carried on for decades: after Cobb’s death and up to the eve of theSecond World War, several generations of Sea Scouts and Sea Rangers would trainaboard these ships.59 While some claimed that the boys would pick up ‘nauticalcomradeship and discipline’, lessons of that sort could easily have been impartedaboard a safe, modern vessel rather than a museum piece.60 It is hard to see howseamanship learned on these creaking relics could have prepared boys for navalcombat in the fast-paced new century. HMS Dreadnought, the first modernbattleship, rendered the ‘kettles’ of the ironclad era obsolete in 1906, and theearly submarines promised to do the same to the Dreadnought before long.61To be sure, the enduring appeal of the ‘tall ship’ has complex roots. Yet if the

belief persisted that ‘an English sailor does not like skulking behind iron plates’, andwooden warships remained a talisman of British manhood, Dibdin’s songs deserveat least a share of the credit.62 As the Foudroyant affair illustrates, it was difficult

57 Hampshire Advertiser (24 September 1892). The poem originally appeared in Punch.58 ‘The last voyage of the Foudroyant’, Pall Mall Gazette (2 December 1892).59 Lambert, Trincomalee, 109–16; Hugh Murphy and Derek J. Oddy, The Mirror of the Seas:

A Centenary History of the Society for Nautical Research (London: Society for Nautical Research, 2010),32, 76–8; Martin Bellamy, ‘Financing the Preservation of Historic Ships’,Mariner’s Mirror 97 (2011):344–65.

60 Lambert, Trincomalee, 114.61 Duncan Redford, The Submarine: A Cultural History from the Great War to Nuclear Combat

(London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).62 Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler, Of Ships and Stars: Maritime Heritage and the Founding

of the National Maritime Museum Greenwich (London: Athlone, 1998), 1–50; Brad Beaven, ‘FromJolly Sailor to Proletarian Jack: The Remaking of Sailortown and the Merchant Seafarer in VictorianLondon’, in Brad Beaven et al. (eds), Port Cities and Urban Cultures (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2015).

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fully to disentangle nostalgia for Dibdin, nostalgia for Nelson’s veterans themselves,and nostalgia for the ships of the Trafalgar era. It was this Dibdin, elevated to thestatus of sailor-laureate and ‘bard’, that would survive into the twentieth century.‘Tom Bowling’ formed one movement of Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British SeaSongs’, composed for the centenary of Trafalgar in 1905. An instant favourite withaudiences, the ‘Sea Songs’ would be played at the Last Night of the Proms fairlyconsistently for one hundred years thereafter; ‘Tom Bowling’ is performed to thisday. Wood remarked on what the boisterous audience participation characteristicof the Last Night meant to him: ‘When I look down on that sea of faces before meand conduct my great, amateur, untrained choir, I know that I am British, I knowthat I am in my native London, and I know that in them the spirit of HoratioNelson still lives and will never die.’63

63 David Cannadine, ‘The “Last Night of the Proms” in Historical Perspective’, Historical Research81 (2008): 315–49, 326.




AfterwordDibdin’s Miscellany

Mark Philp

This volume demonstrates the validity of the editors’ opening remarks—that tostudy Dibdin’s work one needs an eclecticism and range of expertise that pose achallenge to the multiple and divided worlds of academic disciplinary study in thetwenty-first century. That challenge indicates Dibdin’s importance as a windowonto a cultural world that changed dramatically in the last years of his life andsubsequently. Andrew Robinson’s study of the polymath Thomas Young(1773–1829) was called ‘The last man who knew everything’.1 This involves adegree of hyperbole—Young did so largely in relation to what we might call thesciences—but it captures the sense that the breadth of what it was once possible toknow narrowed dramatically in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Theelder Dibdin might be regarded as an arts equivalent. Covering an extraordinaryrange of music, acting, circuses, equestrianism, educational ventures, and theatricalproduction, while also publishing prints, novels, memoirs, histories, tours, andperiodicals, Dibdin traversed a variety of what are now highly specialized spheres ofactivity and study. Moreover, his way of knowing these worlds was not ours.Indeed, rather than thinking of him as a polymath of the arts with an intellectualgrasp of its various dimensions, we might best see him as experiencing thesedimensions as part of an integrated world within which he was able to exercisehis genuine talent for eliciting responses from a wide range of the public. In manyrespects he had a fine entrepreneurial and intuitive practical nous as to what wouldgarner an audience, and what would keep them coming back for more, across anumber of different endeavours. Even as he did so, however, this public culture wasbeginning to divide into distinct aesthetic spheres, with tastes becoming morerefined and exclusive, more plural, but equally more sequestered.In this afterword, informed by the chapters collected here, I want to reflect

briefly on Dibdin’s success, and its relationship to its political context, especiallyduring the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Until recently, scholarship on theeighteenth century offered a narrative of the gradual emergence of polite society,and a correlative polite world of the literature and the arts. The work of SimonDickie and Vic Gatrell, among others, has encouraged us to recognize that, whilepoliteness may well have come to characterize some spheres of life, some dimen-sions of individual lives, and some areas of public and private culture, there were

1 Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything (London: Oneworld, 2006).



equally strong traditions of the bawdy, scatological, and scurrilous.2 The result ofthis revisionism is an increasing sense of there being a more plural, contested, andconflicted cultural and social world at the end of the eighteenth century thanscholars might once have found—or that certain polite, late-Georgian novelistsmight have tempted themodern reader with. Playing to the crowd in such a diverse andconflictual context was doubtless a daunting if also exhilarating prospect: in contrast,more specialized, refined, and rule-governed aesthetic performances might be lessexposing, more technically accomplished, played to a more hushed and reverentialaudience—and less fun. The attempts by the coming generation after 1810 to takeDibdinup, but to aestheticize andpurge his songs (seeCox Jensen’s andLand’s chaptersin this volume) are a striking instance of how rapidly the cultural world was changing inhis final years. As distant inheritors of those aesthetic and disciplinary changes we find itdifficult to make sense of his miscellaneous life and its miscellaneous context—andperhaps above all we find it difficult not to try to impose order, rationality, principles,or aesthetic sense across the range of Dibdin’s various ‘performances’, while simultan-eously lacking the versatility to appreciate the full range of his achievements.We face a further difficulty in gauging his contemporary significance and

subsequent influence, especially in the troubled decades after 1789. And there isthe further challenge of estimating how far the events of that period might haveplayed an important part in the development of the changes in public culture thatmarked the beginning of the nineteenth century. Associated with these difficultiesis the fact that our specialisms and our ‘modernity’ do not help us to imagine theimpact of Dibdin’s performances on a world so very different from our own—boththe immediate impact in terms of entertainment, laughter, and the eliciting of arange of emotions, and the longer-term effect of these on the ways in which peopleexperienced their world and thought about the choices before them—perhapsespecially in terms of the war with France and the crisis of legitimacy for WilliamPitt the Younger’s government.One feature of eighteenth-century life that E. P. Thompson liked to emphasize

was its rambunctiousness—its sheer absence of politeness and its cross-class ten-sions and insolences: ‘[T]hey enjoyed liberties of pushing about the streets andjostling, gaping and huzzaing, pulling down the houses of obnoxious bakers orDissenters, and a generally riotous and unpoliced disposition which astonishedforeign visitors, and which almost misled them themselves into believing that theywere free.’3 A component of that public culture was its very openness—that, if noteveryone, then at least a fair slice of all and sundry could turn up at the theatre,could abuse the actors, sing the songs, laugh and cry together, and jostle theirbetters in the crowd. And outside the theatre many of its songs were accessible to allthrough slips and ballad sheets or from the singing of ballad sellers in the streets.Linking to that audience—indeed, winning over that audience, keeping it engaged,

2 Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental EighteenthCentury (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011); Gatrell, City of Laughter; Kate Davison, ‘OccasionalPoliteness and Gentleman’s Laughter in 18th C England’, Historical Journal 57 (2014): 921–45.

3 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 95.

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rather than suffering its hostility—might require a range of techniques andresources: spectacle, pathos, tragedy, laughter, or drawing upon references andimagery that could elicit and capture the imagination. Reaching into that worldis difficult for us: our relationship to music is different simply by virtue of its varietyand accessibility in the modern world; and our taste in entertainment is dramatic-ally different, in part because of the spectrum available and the technologicalinnovations available to deliver it, but also in part because of the implicit connec-tions we make, relatively unconsciously, between aesthetic distinctions and socialregisters. Although late-eighteenth-century London had considerable variation informs of public performance, it was a dramatically more constrained, but also apotentially less divided and more open palette with which to innovate and entertainthan we face today. Yet Dibdin demonstrated his capacity to do precisely that overand over again, and he did it in a way that invited a broad section of the populationinto his audiences.This volume contributes to our understanding of exactly how Dibdin achieved

that—for example, by writing material that was closely linked to particular per-formers, by care and investment in the staging of material, by working on connec-tions with theatre managers, and eventually by taking the whole operation of thetheatre into his own hands. But the more puzzling aspects to the modern reader andscholar are issues such as: What made people laugh, and what sort of laughter wasit? Why did certain songs catch on, and others not? What sorts of spectacle mightbring people back for more, or was spectacle always a short-lived phenomenon,resulting in either satiety or the search for something still more spectacular? Whatmaterial worked with which kind of audience, and exactly what sort of audiencesdid Dibdin’s work attract? For example, the philosopher, novelist, and aspiringdramatist William Godwin, despite being a regular theatregoer, seems to havecaught only an afterpiece of Dibdin’s—his ‘Divertissement’—following a perform-ance of Venice Preserved in November 1790, and a performance of The Watermanin 1810.4 Despite Thomas Holcroft’s musical and theatrical interests he does notseem to have met Dibdin, although he met Dibdin’s son Thomas, probably onseveral occasions. He also indicated the latter’s acknowledgement of the virtues ofCharles Dibdin the Younger; and he recorded his disapproval of their father for his‘reprehensible’ conduct towards his illegitimate sons. He was clearly aware ofThomas Dibdin’s work, but made no reference to that of his father besidesdescribing him—perhaps over-restrictively—as a ‘musical composer’.5 Joseph Far-ington reports at second hand Dibdin senior’s singing at the anniversary dinner forthe Royal Academy, where his informants ‘were well pleased with humorous songssung by Dibdin’ (5 June 1807), but does not record that he himself attended anyperformances.6 So there is an issue about who his audience was and how far he

4 Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (eds), The Diary of William Godwin(Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

5 Thomas Holcroft, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols (London, 1816), 3:133.6 The Diary of Joseph Farington, Index Volume, ed. Kathryn Cave (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1998), 3059.

223Afterword



tailored his adaptations for particular audiences (such as the RA), as against hismore popular productions. It is also worth emphasizing that some of his mostsuccessful periods were when touring the country at large to audiences that werepotentially rather different from those encountered in London. Above all, whatenabled him to connect with these diverse audiences, and to what effect?Dibdin had his own views as to the reasons for his success: writing with respect to

his 1792–3 entertainment Castles in the Air, he claimed:

I must confess that if I had gratified my inclination, and gone for fame alone, I shouldhave written my performances in a style of elevation, and given them a classical turn;but I knew that trifles, mere nothings, were best calculated to succeed with the public.Of what use would it have been to lecture my audience when it was my business tomake them laugh, which nothing can do, or ever did, but broad humour? . . .Mybusiness has been as much as possible to give an opposite effect to the song, as theysucceed each other . . . I therefore leave the subject of the song gradually, get into someextraneous matter, and then bring the audience into that state of temper that bestinclines them to relish the song which is to follow[.]7

This alternation—and transitioning—between comic and sentimental was a crucialcomponent of many of his works. So too, was the recurrent theme of the unthink-ing world and its cruelty or indifference towards those who are marked by goodnessand virtue. In ‘Tom Tackle’, also from Castles in the Air, Tom is over and over againdespised for his poverty, brought on by his kindness and benevolence, until he isfinally set on his feet with a pension that gives him ‘just enough to be gen’rous—toomuch to be poor’.8 Dibdin’s final song in performances of Castles, ‘The Trial’,reviewed the likely indictment that his critics would level at him, and then ranthrough the characters represented in the songs in order to defend himself:

The indictment runs thus—If it plainly appears,That said Dibdin, of critics despising all fearsHath corrupted your hearts, while he tickles your ears,He stands guilty—if not, he’s acquitted.But to clear me, I trust, of all dulness prepense,I’ll examine each witness by way of defence:In his bulls shall my Irishman blunder good sense,Nor be even my ploughman omitted.Tom Tackle humanity’s duty shall teach;My Soldier your hearts through compassion shall reach;My Parson shall pray, and my Gipsy beseech,That I may be fairly acquitted.9

The contrasting and alternating emotions that Dibdin generates are here seen tobuild a case—and a judgement in the singer’s favour—to acquit him of corruptingthe hearts of his audience, by having warmed them and opened them to hischaracters, and by having gratified their own sense of good judgement—with ahefty degree of indulgence to the clumsy but well-meaning people he has conjured up.

7 Life, 3:273–5. 8 Hogarth, 1:139. 9 Ibid., 1:141.

Mark Philp224



As has been argued in this volume, this is certainly not tub-thumping loyalism, butneither is it radicalism. It is entertainment that achieves its effect in part by generatinga degree of moral complaisance: a sense that there is a natural order to the world, inwhich true British character plays a large role, but it is one that the entertainmentserves to elicit and confirm, through playing with the laughter and sentimentalism ofits audience. Perhaps it is not surprising that the intellectuals whose diaries we haveshow so few signs of indulging in Dibdin’s entertainment—and not surprising thatwhen he turned up at the Royal Academy in 1807, Farington’s reference was tocomic songs, not to the more sentimental form. But his real métier was a slightlydifferent audience, of largely ordinary people, whom he played with great skill.In many ways one of the most difficult aspects to understand in this period, in

relation to public culture and its complexities, is the interaction between entertain-ment and politics that much of Dibdin’s work epitomizes. This is especially true ofhis sailor songs, but it is certainly not restricted to these: as Felicity Nussbaumshows in Chapter Two of this volume, there are dimensions of his blackface actingand representation of race that raise similar issues. Indeed, there is a danger ofimposing upon Dibdin’s world a conception of politics, based on lyrics, recitatives,and narratives, which misses something central to that world. When the shoemakerand reformer Thomas Hardy wrote to his cousin that he relished a dish of politics, anot uncommon expression, we should take the metaphor of consumption seriously.It was an imbibing of news and events and a discussing of their significance. Formost people politics meant just that, or else meant more specifically the highpolitics of parliament and international affairs, over which they had no controland upon which they conceived themselves as having little influence: a set ofbackground events, or public theatre, rather than a sphere of agency. Hardy’sLondon Corresponding Society began to change that conception for some of itsmembers, but for the audiences streaming to Dibdin’s entertainments, commentson and references to public affairs were likely to be attended by a frisson ofrecognition, rather than experienced as an invitation, let alone an incitement, topolitical activity. We might see something similar taking place in Dibdin’s contribu-tions to issues of race and equality, the contradictions of which Nussbaum explores.Take for example the song, written for The Islanders in 1780—

Dear Yanko say, and true he say,All mankind, one and t’other,Negro, mulatto, and malay,Through all the world be broder.

—the second verse of which begins:

What harm dere in a shape or make?What harm in ugly feature?Whatever colour, form, he take,The heart make human creature.10

10 Life, 2:74–5.

225Afterword



The caricature of speech, doubtless exaggerated further on stage, nonetheless sitsalongside an ostensible message of brotherhood—albeit there is no mention in thesong of whites, and the chorus of ‘Negro, mulatto, and malay’might be interpretedas a sequestering of subspecies, rather than an appeal to the wider brotherhood ofman. But rather than emphasize the words, we might equally emphasize thesentiment that the song, with words and music combined, might elicit: a balladwith a melodic chorus that in itself encourages a sympathy and sentimental unionwith the singer that need not be undercut by the patronizing representation of thelanguage. We cannot be sure that this is the way to read (or hear) it, or that it wasever experienced in this way, but the example indicates the difficulty of focusingwholly on the lyric of the song to capture its impact on the audience. Moreover,pathos and sentimentality are not inevitably an invitation or spur to action in one’sprivate life, let alone on the local political stage, which for most people would be thelimit of their self-conception as a political agent. Only in the development of masspetitioning at the end of the century, with the innovative move of a sugar boycottinspired by William Fox in 1791, and with the establishment of correspondingsocieties and associations for the dissemination of information, did forms ofpractical political action offer themselves to those so moved; and certainly Dibdindoes not himself enjoin such action.Similar difficulties attend our reading of loyalism into the sailor songs. In the

Professional Life, Dibdin’s expression of outrage at being cast as a government pawnpaid £400 a year to open against Thelwall’s lectures in Beaufort Buildings in theStrand was a little overdone, as was his claim that on the basis of these rumours hewas rejected by ‘a large body of the public’. Nonetheless, we should acknowledgehis insistence that he was not seeking to command obedience, but ‘mildly, recom-mending acquiescence’, and was convinced that in doing so he was conveying ‘aproud compliment to the mind of every honest man and honourable subject’.11Perhaps the subtlety of Dibdin’s politics was that it was not really ‘politics’ as we

think of it: not a spur to action so much as an emotional bridge to one’s fellow menand women that enabled people to find the ‘better’ part of their natures as Englishmen and women, and drew it out for them to be reflected to them, amused by, andwarmed by. This is not unlike some of the bawdier prints, squibs, and lampoons ofpublic culture, such as those discussed by Harriet Guest in relation to Margate:nothing too refined, something for men and women with heart and humour, andfor people who can see that human nature has a rude type of health and who reflecton it with satisfaction. Not much of the sponsored loyalism in the 1790s was of thisform—it was tub-thumping, imperative, enlisting, and dogged, and it foundunorthodoxy in multiple places. That culture was dramatically less tolerant andsubstantially less confirmatory than that which might be experienced at a Dibdinentertainment, yet its reach was very considerable, creating an atmosphere in whichinnovation was suspect and in which cultural forms might need to become highlyspecialized to avoid accusations of corrupt populism. This loyalist culture of

11 Ibid., 4:8.

Mark Philp226



suspicion mistrusted any easy mixing of class and status, and it was compounded byan emerging moralism and evangelism that sought to discipline the habits ofthe lower orders, and turned its attention to the more doubtful pastimes of themiddling sort. In this culture, even Dibdin could become suspect.That this public culture underwent a set of rather straitening vicissitudes in the

first half of the nineteenth century—becoming more specialist and more divided,with popular sports and pastimes increasingly policed, and the lustier aspectsof life relegated to the dens and alleyways by a sense of both propriety andimprovement—did not eliminate Dibdin’s appeal. But increasingly it ‘edited’him, and his market narrowed accordingly. Indeed, Dibdin himself recognizedthe extent to which the Wars had filled the theatres of the revolutionary period, asubject discussed further by Valladares in Chapter Nine—in part because of peoplebeing on the move, but also because of people’s need for distraction and entertain-ment, and perhaps their need for confirmation of their membership of a collective,and thereby their search for collective laughter to provide relief from cares.12 If thatis right, then much of Dibdin’s loyalism was a case of giving people what theywanted: less propaganda, more emotional release, legitimized laughter, and distrac-tion, and for many the fulfilment of a desire for confirmation in and of an order thatthey found some satisfaction in endorsing and in seeing themselves as embodiedand contained within. Contained within, that is, not as identical subjects, but asmembers of a wide cast of characters, a miscellaneous bunch brought together andunited, if only for a while, in a set of common (both basic and shared) emotions andreactions. Moreover, while a general tone of loyalism remained, it could also besuspect. The political polarization of the 1790s and early 1800s can be seen asplacing considerable strain on this miscellany of types, with its robust humour,playful satire, and tolerant ironies. And that strain might have contributed to theincreasing fragmentation of popular culture, and an increasing aestheticization andsequestering of the arts, in ways that increasingly de-popularized and thereby partlydepoliticized much literary, theatrical, and artistic culture.Dibdin’s one-man band, then, played to a potential audience for a united Britain,

yet his legacy found a more restricted set of spaces and played to more targeted anddelimited audiences. For all his long legacy, the nineteenth century ironed out a gooddeal of the heart and soul, the pathos, robust mirthfulness, and bonhomie of Dibdin’stheatricals and performances. Grasping his earlier appeal helps us also to see somethingof a rather different world—one that the years after 1815 sought to set firmly in thepast and against which there developed a widening range of specialist performances forsuitably appreciative, attentive, and disciplined audiences. Recovering Dibdin’s rich,miscellaneous world should help us to recognize how dramatically popular culturebegan to change in the course of the revolutionary era.

12 On forms of laughter and eighteenth-century understandings of it, see Mark Knights and AdamMorton (eds), Laughter and Satire in the Early Modern Period (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2017),Chapter One.

227Afterword



Bibliography

Throughout the bibliography, works by a single author are listed chronologically.

SELECTED WORKS BY CHARLES DIBDIN

N.B. For a full bibliography of the works of Charles Dibdin the Elder, see Dibdin, EdwardRimbault, A Charles Dibdin Bibliography (Liverpool: Privately Printed, 1937).

A Collection of English Songs and Cantatas . . .Opera Primo (London, 1761).The Shepherd’s Artifice, A Dramatic Pastoral (London, 1765).The Songs in the Comic Opera of the Captive (London, 1769).The Waterman. A Comic Opera of Two Acts (London, 1774).The Comic Mirror, or, The World as it Wags (London, 1775).The Seraglio: A Comic Opera, in Two Acts (London, 1776).The Graces, an Intermezzo in One Act. As it is Performed at the Royal Circus, in St. George’s

Fields (London, 1782).The Cestus: a Serenata as Performed at the Royal Circus (London, [1783]).The Royal Circus Epitomized (London, 1784).The Magic of Orosmanes; Or, Harlequin Slave and Sultan: A Pantomime, Drawn from the

Arabian Legends (London, 1785).The Devil, 2 vols (London, 1786–7).The Musical Tour of Mr Dibdin; in which—previous to his embarkation for India—he finished

his career as a public character (Sheffield, 1788).The By-stander; or, Universal Weekly Expositor. By a Literary Association (London, 1789–90).A Letter on Musical Education, by Mr Dibdin (London, 1791).A Collection of Songs, Selected from the Works of Mr Dibdin, 2 vols (London, 1792)Hannah Hewit; or, The Female Crusoe, 3 vols (London, 1792).The Younger Brother: A Novel, 3 vols (London, [1793]).A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols (London, 1797–1800).Songs, &c. In New Years Gifts. A New Entertainment of Sans Souci. Written, Composed,

Spoken, Sung, and Accompanied By Mr Dibdin (London, 1802?).Observations on a Tour through almost the whole of England, and a considerable part of

Scotland, in a series of letters, addressed to a large number of intelligent and respectable friends,2 vols (London, 1802).

The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin, written by himself, together with the words of six hundredsongs, 4 vols (London, 1803).

British War Songs (London, 1803).The Harmonic Preceptor (London, 1804).The Musical Mentor, or St. Cecilia at School (London, 1805).The English Pythagoras, or, Every Man His Own Music Master (London, 1807).Henry Hooka. A Novel, 3 vols (London, 1807).The Public Undeceived, written by Mr Dibdin; and containing a statement of all the material

facts relative to his pension (London, [1807]).The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin [including the engraving and plates intended for the 1803

edition] (London, 1809).Music Epitomized: A School Book (London, c.1810).



Six Lessons for the Harpsichord, or Piano Forte (London, n.d.).The Overture & Favorite Songs in the Blackamoor: A New Comic Opera (London, n.d.).

SELECTED COLLABORATIONS OF CHARLES DIBDIN

With Bate Dudley, Henry, The Black-a-Moor Wash’d White: A Comic Opera (1776), inLarpent MS 400, Huntington Library.

With Bickerstaff, Isaac, Lionel and Clarissa: A Comic Opera (London, 1768).With Bickerstaff, Isaac, The Padlock: A Comic Opera (London, 1768).With Bickerstaff, Isaac, The Captive. A Comic Opera (London, 1769).With Bickerstaff, Isaac, The Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio. A Farce in Two Acts (London,

1781).With Garrick, David, Songs, Chorusses, &c. which are introduced in the New Entertainment of

the Jubilee, at the Theatre Royal, in Drury Lane (London, 1769).With Waldron, Francis Godolphin, How Do You Do?, nos.1–8 (London, 1796).

COMPILATIONS OF CHARLES DIBDIN

Anon. The Songs of Charles Dibdin, 2 vols (London, 1839).Anon. The Selected Songs of Charles Dibdin (London, 1845).Barrett, William Alexander (ed.), Twenty-One Songs Composed by Charles Dibdin.

1745–1814. (London and New York, [1890]).Dibdin, Edward Rimbault,ACharles Dibdin Bibliography (Liverpool: Privately Printed, 1937).Dibdin, Thomas, Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibdin, with a Memoir and

Addenda (London, 1841).Dibdin, Thomas, Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin: With a Memoir (2nd edn, London, 1841).Dibdin, Thomas, Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin; with a Memoir (3rd edn, London, 1852).Hogarth, George, The Songs of Charles Dibdin, chronologically arranged, with notes, historical,

biographical, and critical, 2 vols (London, 1842, 1848).Kitchiner, William, The Sea Songs of Charles Dibdin, with a memoir of his life and writings by

William Kitchiner, M.D. (London, 1823).

SELECTED WORKS BY CHARLES ISAAC MUNGOAND THOMAS JOHN DIBDIN

Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Poetical Attempts: By A Young Man (London, 1792).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Songs, &c with a Description of the Scenery in the New Aqua-

Drama called ‘The Corsair’ (London, 1814).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Songs, &c in the Pantomime called ‘Harlequin Brilliant; or,

The Clown’s Capers’ (London, 1815).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Songs, and other Vocal Compositions in the Pantomime called

‘Mermaid; or, Harlequin Pearl Diver!’ (London, 1815).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Young Arthur; or, The Child of Mystery: A Metrical Romance

(London, 1819).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, A History of the London Theatres (London, 1826).Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger, ed. George Speaight(1830, pub. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1956).

Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, The Physiological Mentor; or, Lessons from Nature (London,1833).

Bibliography230



Dibdin, Thomas John [as Thomas Merchant], Comic Songs (London, 1794).Dibdin, Thomas John [as Thomas Merchant], The Mad Guardian: or, Sunshine after Rain.

A farce (1793, pub. Huddersfield, 1795).Dibdin, Thomas John, Songs, Chorusses, &c. in the New Pantomime of Harlequin’s Tour; or,

The Dominion of Fancy. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden (London, 1800).Dibdin, Thomas John, Five Miles Off; or, The Finger Post (London, 1806).Dibdin, Thomas John, Bonifacio and Bridgetina; or, The Knight of the Hermitage; or, The

Windmill Turrett; or, The Spectre of the North-East Gallery (London: J. Barker, 1808).Dibdin, Thomas John, A Metrical History of England (London, 1813).Dibdin, Thomas John, Harlequin Hoax, or, A Pantomime Proposed (London, 1814).Dibdin, Thomas John (ed.), The London Theatre, 6 vols (London, 1815).Dibdin, Thomas John, Dibdin’s London Theatre, 26 vols (London, 1815–18).Dibdin, Thomas John,Morning, Noon and Night; or, The Romance of a Day (London, 1822).Dibdin, Thomas John, The Cabinet (New edn, London, 1829).Dibdin, Thomas John, Tom Dibdin’s Penny Trumpet, 4 nos (Oct–Nov 1832).Dibdin, Thomas John, Last Lays of the Last of the Three Dibdins (London, 1833).Dibdin, Thomas John, The Reminiscences of Thomas Dibdin, 2 vols (London, 1837).

ARCHIVAL SOURCES/COLLECTIONS

British Library, Add. MS 27825: Francis Place, ‘Collections relating to Manners andMorals’.

British Library, Add. MSS 30960–7: Charles Dibdin, ‘Fragments . . . ’.The Garrick Club, London (uncatalogued), ‘Sadler’s Wells Scene Book’.Hampshire Record Office, 28A11/A3, A7–A8: Jane Austen Songbooks.Huntington Library, California, John Larpent Plays, 1814 MS.LA1824, Manuscript of

Thomas Dibdin, Harlequin Hoax; or, A Pantomime Proposed.Royal College of Music, Taylor Collection 2143, Series 6 of 7 of Edward Taylor’s lectures

on English Dramatic Music, Lecture 3: Edward Taylor, ‘Charles Dibdin’.University of Harvard, Houghton Library Theater Collection, MS Thr 198: fragments by

and relating to Charles Dibdin.Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre Collection: ‘Astley’s Amphitheatre’ box.

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

British Museum Collection Online, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx.

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/.Myers, Victoria, O’Shaughnessy, David, and Philp, Mark (eds), The Diary of William

Godwin (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.Newman, Ian, London Corresponding Society Meeting Places: Exploring the 1790s Alehouse,

http://www.1790salehouse.com/.Norfolk Museums Catton Collection, http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Research/Collec

tions/Fine_Art_Collections/The_Catton_Collection/index.htm.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–), http://

www.odnb.com.Royal Museums Greenwich Collections, http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections.html.

231Bibliography



PERIODICALS

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1905).British Critic (1793–1815).British Stage and Literary Cabinet (1817–22).Cheshire Observer and General Advertiser (1854–63).Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée (1832–6).Crypt, or, Receptacle for Things Past (1827–8).Daily Advertiser (1731–98).Daily Courant (1702–35).Daily Post (1719–46).Diary, or, Woodfall’s Register (1789–93).Drama; Or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine (1821–6).Edinburgh Annual Register (1808–26).Edinburgh Magazine, or, Weekly Amusement (1779–83).English Review, or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature (1783–96).European Magazine and London Review (1782–1825).Evening Telegraph (Dundee, 1877–1905).Examiner; a Sunday Paper (1808–36).Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (1764–96).General Evening Post (1733–1822).General Magazine and Impartial Review (1787–92).Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922).Hampshire Advertiser (1860–1923).Hampshire Telegraph, and Sussex Chronicle (1803–99).Illustrated London News (1842–).La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (1806–32).Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (1819–28).Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc. (1817–62).London Evening Post (1727–1806).London Magazine (1820–9).London Recorder, and Sunday Gazette (1783–95).Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal (1749–1844).Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (1780–1800).Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (1780–5).Morning Post (1772–1937).Musical Times and Singing Class Circular (1844–1903).Musical World: a Weekly Record of Musical Science, Literature, and Intelligence (1836–90).Newcastle Weekly Courant (1884–1902).New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1821–36).News (1805–35).New York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette (1824–42).Nottingham Evening Post (1878–1963).Observer (1791–).Oracle and Public Advertiser (1794–8).Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1921).Parker’s General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer (1776–82).Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (1861–1913).Pic Nic (1803).

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Public Advertiser (1752–94).Punch (1841–1992).Quarterly Review (1809–1967).Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette (1767–1831).Satirist, Or, Monthly Meteor (1808–14).Spectator (1711–14).Spectator (1828–).Standard (1827–1920).Star and Evening Advertiser (1788–1800).St. James’ Chronicle; or the British Evening Post (1761–1866).Theatrical Inquisitor (1812–20).Theatrical Observer: and Daily Bills of the Play (1822–36).Theatrical Repertory, or Weekly Rosciad (1801–2).The Times (1788–).Tomahawk, or Censor General (1795–6).True Briton (1793–1804).Westminster Magazine, or, Pantheon of Taste (1773–85).Whitehall Evening Post (1718–1801).World (1787–94).

CORRESPONDENCE AND LIFE-WRITING

Angelo, Henry, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 2 vols (London, 1828).Anon., Truth Opposed to Fiction, or, An Authentic and Impartial Review of the Life of the Late

Earl of Barrymore by a Personal Observer (London, 1793).Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2002).Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1980).Brown, Eluned (ed.), The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the diary of Henry

Crabb Robinson (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966).Crosby, Benjamin, Crosby’s Pocket Companion to the Playhouses. Being the Lives of All the

Principal London Performers (London, 1796).Dawe, George, The Life of George Morland, with Remarks on His Works (London, 1807).Farington, Joseph, The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kathryn Cave, 16 vols (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1982).Farington, Joseph, The Diary of Joseph Farington, Index Volume, ed. Kathryn Cave (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).Gardiner, William, Music and Friends: or, Pleasant Recollections of a Dilettante, 2 vols

(London, 1838).Holcroft, Thomas, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols (London, 1816).Knight, Charles, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, 3 vols (London, 1864).Lee, Henry,Memoirs of a Manager; or, Life’s Stage with New Scenery, 2 vols (Taunton, 1830).Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen: A Family Record (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004).Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen’s Letters (4th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).Lisle, Mary, ‘Long, Long Ago:’ An Autobiography (London, 1856).Mathews, Ann, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, 4 vols (London, 1839).

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Morpurgo, J. E. (ed.), The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (London: The Cresset Press, 1959).Munden, T. S., Memoir of Joseph Shepherd Munden, Comedian (London, 1846).Nelson, Alfred L. and Cross, Gilbert B. (eds), Selections from James Winston’s Diaries

1819–1827 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1974).O’Keeffe, John, Recollections of the Life of John O’Keefe, written by himself, 2 vols (London,

1826).Pasquin, Anthony [John Williams], The Life of the Late Earl of Barrymore (London, 1793).Peake, Richard Brinsley, Memoirs of the Colman Family, Including their Correspondence

(London, 1841).Phillips, Henry, Musical and Personal Recollections during Half a Century, 2 vols (London,

1864).Thorn, Henry G., Charles Dibdin, one of Southampton’s Sons (Southampton and London,

1888).Thornbury, Walter, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, 2 vols (1862, repr. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2013).

NOVELS AND POETRY

Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park (London, 1814).Bloomfield, Robert, The Works of Robert Bloomfield (London, 1867).Bloomfield, Robert, Selected Poems: Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. John Lucas and John

Goodridge (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007).Burney, Frances, The Wanderer (London, 1814).Edgeworth, Maria, Patronage (London, 1814).Haywood, Eliza, The Mercenary Lover; or, the Unfortunate Heiresses . . .To which is added,

The Padlock; or, no guard without virtue. A Novel. (London, 1728).Pasquin, Anthony [John Williams], The Children of Thespis (London, 1786).Prior, Matthew, ‘An English Padlock’ (London, 1705).Wolcot, John, The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq., 5 vols (New edn, London, 1812).

PLAYS

Federico, Gennaro Antonio, The Servant Mistress (London, 1770).Foote, Samuel, A Trip to Calais: A Comedy in Three Acts . . . to which is annexed, ‘The

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Comp. by: Shanmugapriya Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003343145 Date:6/10/17Time:11:02:06 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003343145.3DDictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 245

Index

Abolitionism, see SlaveryAckermann, Rudolph (1764–1834) 165–6Addison, Joseph (1672–1719) 67, 70, 75, 117,

166, 187Adelphi theatre 173. See also Sans Pareil theatreAikin, John (1747–1822) 116Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

(1819–61) 209Aldridge, Ira (1807?–67) 24Aleph, see Harvey, WilliamAnacreontic Society 161, 163–4Andrews, Robert, scene painter 174–8Anecdote (as genre) 4–5, 89, 105Angelo, Henry Charles William

(1756–1835) 98n, 164Aquatic theatre 172–4, 182–3, 188Army, British 85–6, 90, 97, 111Arne, Thomas (1710–78) 71nAssociation for the Preservation of Liberty and

Property 86Astley, John (1768–1821) 183Astley, Philip (1742–1814) 12, 16, 43, 45–6,

48, 53Astley’s Amphitheatre 43, 45, 183, 186Austen, Jane (1775–1817) 2, 17, 98n, 99, 100,

108–12Austria 24

Balfe, Michael William (1808–70) 212–14Ballad singers 16, 118, 127–8, 131, 146, 222.

See also Broadside balladsBannister, Charles (1741–1804) 161, 163Baring-Gould, Sabine (1834–1924) 132Barrett, William Alexander (1836–91) 133Barry, Richard, 7th Earl of Barrymore

(1769–93) 96, 98–9, 100Bate, Sir Henry Dudley (1745–1824) 36, 68n,

69–70Beard, John (1716/17–91) 12Beattie, James (1735–1803) 25Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827) 206Belgium 175Bell, John, journalist (1745–1831) 76Berlioz, Hector (1803–69) 212Bickerstaff, Isaac (1733–after 1808) 2, 3, 11–12,

17, 23–4, 27, 40, 78–9, 83, 143Blackface, see Race, also Dibdin, Charles: Mungo

(role of )Blake, William (1757–1827) 7Bland, Maria, née Romanzini

(1769–1838) 49–50, 54Bloomfield, Robert (1766–1823) 6, 17, 59–63Bostock, Robert, printer 79, 83

Boyce, William (1711–79) 55, 136Braham, John (1777?–1856) 15, 193Britton, John (1771–1857) 124, 126Broadside ballads 15–16, 18, 127–8, 222Brunias, Agostino (1730?–96) 30Burgoyne, John (1723–92) 71n, 72Burke, Edmund (1729/30–97) 14, 117–18Burney, Charles (1726–1814) 14, 100, 166Burney, Frances (1776–1828) 98n, 100Burns, Robert (1759–96) 6, 132, 210Byron, George, 6th Baron (1788–1824) 132,

173, 184

Campbell, Thomas (1777–1844) 212–13Caribbean 26, 30, 37, 39, 94Catnach, James (‘Jemmy’) (1792–1841) 15, 16Catton, Charles the Elder (1728–98) 144,

154, 156Celebrity 80, 82, 84Cervantes, Miguel de (1547?–1616) 23–4Cherry, Andrew (1762–1812) 191Child actors 47–50, 54–5, 172Church of England, see ReligionCibber, Theophilus (1703–58) 48Clamp, Robert, artist 151–2Clint, Luke, scene painter 174–5Cobb, Geoffrey Wheatley, businessman 216,

218Cobb, Gerald (1838–1904) 204Cobb, James (1756–1818) 191Cobbett, William (1763–1835) 115Coburg theatre 172, 179Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834) 1n, 7Collins, William, art dealer 161, 163–4Colman, George the Elder (1732–94) 12Colman, George the Younger (1762–1836) 15,

54, 191, 196–8, 201Commercial Treaty, Anglo-French (1786) 73,

76, 87Common Pleas, Court of 79Cooke, Thomas Potter (1786–1864) 134Covent Garden theatre 4, 7, 12, 13, 16, 24, 39,

54, 156, 164, 174, 189, 193–5, 201Cowley, Hannah (1743–1809) 71n, 74, 104Cowper, William (1731–1800) 117nCraven, Elizabeth, Margravine of Ansbach

(1750–1828) 95–7, 104Crosby, Benjamin, writer 142–3Crown and Anchor Tavern 164Cruikshank, George (1792–1878) 16, 209Cruikshank, Isaac (1756–1811) 16, 144, 156Cummings, William Hayman

(1831–1915) 136

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 6/10/2017, SPi


Daly, Richard (1758–1813) 66, 73, 75Daniel, George, writer 193Davenport, John, printer 127–8Davenport, Mary Ann (1759–1843) 118Davidson, George H., writer 209–10Delaval, Sir Francis Drake (d.1826) 96Dialect 26, 32, 36–8, 59–63, 89, 111, 138, 140,

197, 209Dibdin, Anne (1776–?) 163, 165–6Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo (1768–1833) 11,

18, 26, 58, 171–88, 223Dibdin, Charles the Elder (1745 –1814)and the law 12–13, 17, 48, 55–7, 66, 72,

78–9, 83–4, 89, 92and the press 4, 17, 31, 45, 48–9, 52, 55–7,

64–77, 78–9, 81, 82–4, 86–7, 99,101–2, 105–6, 116, 124, 141–3, 153

and the sea 1, 4, 8, 18, 63, 85–6, 90, 111,115–16, 122–4, 128–36, 137–40,143, 146, 163, 204–19, 225–6

audience 13, 15–16, 26, 32, 36, 45, 70,73–4, 81–2, 84, 87, 90–3, 102, 106,124–8, 131, 137, 146, 157, 204,206–7, 222–7

business dealings 4, 43–6, 55–8, 66, 75–6,90, 99, 101, 105–6, 119, 123, 126–7,130, 145–6, 153, 158, 164, 167,204, 223

collaborations 11–14, 24, 43–6, 50, 53–4,55–8, 66, 67n, 73, 78, 130

education 60as ‘genius’ 6, 205, 210government pension 1, 90–1, 129, 207, 226legacy 6, 15, 18, 23, 81, 85, 115, 132–6, 187,

204–19Mungo, role of 1, 3, 9, 16, 23–36, 41–2,

141–2, 144painting 164–6performance, see solo entertainmentspolitics 8–9, 17, 39, 42, 52, 65–77, 79,

84–93, 103, 105, 110–11, 128–9,139–40, 207, 222–7

private life 118, 206–7, 223reputation and character 1, 3, 5, 15, 17, 37,

41, 60, 65, 75–6, 78–93, 106,115–16, 143, 145–6, 165–7, 171,187, 205–6, 223, 226

solo entertainments 3–4, 13, 17, 37–8,79–93, 95, 101–6, 118, 124–6,137–43, 153, 164, 206, 223–7

songwriting 81, 116–24, 128, 130, 137, 143tours 2, 39, 76, 103, 124, 126–7, 140, 146,

164–7, 224works

BooksComplete History of the English Stage 4, 14Hannah Hewitt 2, 4The Harmonic Preceptor 109Musical Mentor 11, 17, 108–9

Musical Tour 9, 14, 39, 104, 122–3Observations 14, 81–2, 140, 164–6Professional Life 1, 3–6, 11–13, 55, 58, 60,

66, 73, 75, 83, 127, 130, 139, 146,163–4, 166–7, 226

The Public Undeceived 90The Royal Circus Epitomized 55–7The Younger Brother 4, 66CollectionsBritish War Songs 90–1The Feast of Reason (unpublished) 101nPeriodicalsBy-Stander 4, 75–7, 87Devil 4, 17, 65–77, 87–8How Do You Do? 105–6Full productionsThe Blackamoor Wash’d White 23, 36–7The Captive 11, 23, 40The Cestus 49The Comic Mirror 12The Ephesian Matron 11The Fairy World 49, 56The Graces 54He Would If He Cou’d 11The Islanders 225The Jubilee 13, 73, 127The Lancashire Witches 3Liberty Hall 123, 161Lionel and Clarissa 11Love in the City 11The Magic of Orosmanes 16, 23, 38–9,

52–3The Padlock 3, 9, 11, 23–36, 39, 41, 78Poor Vulcan! 54The Recruiting Sarjeant 11Robinson Crusoe 105nThe Seraglio 16, 23, 40The Sultan 11, 23, 40–1The Touchstone 3The Waterman 12, 223Vineyard Revels 3Will o’ the Wisp 62Solo productionsBritons Strike Home 91Castles in the Air 82, 89, 224Christmas Gambols 137, 141, 143, 153Great News 87–8The Oddities 163Private Theatricals 8, 94, 101–5The Quizzes 86A Tour to the Land’s End 119, 124, 126The Whims of the Moment 103Songs‘The Advantage of Toping’ 151‘Bachelor’s Hall’ 108, 110‘The Battle of Corunna’ 209‘Bill Bobstay’ 8–9, 103‘Blow high, blow low’ 147‘The Bumpkin in Town’ 62–3

Index246



‘The Can of Grog’ 213–14‘The Compact of Freedom’ 86–7‘Constancy’ 109‘Dear Yanko Say’ 225–6‘Divertissement’ 223‘The Elopement’ 158, 160, 162‘The Fair’ 149‘The Gardener’ 61‘The Greenwich Pensioner’ 145, 149–51,

158, 213‘The High-Mettl’d Racer’ 161‘Jack Ratlin’ 123, 129, 208‘Jack’s Gratitude’ 103n‘Jacky and the Cow’ 141, 148‘Joltering Giles’ 59‘The Joys of the Country’ 63, 108, 111‘The Lamplighter’ 108, 158‘Lamplighter Dick’ 110, 213‘The Lucky Escape’ 108, 111‘The Margate Hoy’, see ‘A Voyage to

Margate’‘A Matrimonial Thought’ 14‘Le Philosophe Sans Souci’ 94n‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’ 151, 158–9,

161, 163‘Naval Victories’ 210‘Ninety Three’ 86‘Ode on the Nuptuals of the Prince and

Princess of Wales’ 143‘Pomposo’ 209‘Poor Jack’ 76, 145, 158, 205, 208,

213, 215‘Poor Orra Tink’ 108, 111‘A Portrait of Innocence’ 109‘The Preservation of the

Braganzas’ 209–10‘The Rights of Man’ 8‘The Sailor’s Journal’ 61–2‘The Sailor’s Return’ 103n‘The Soldier’s Adieu’ 108, 111‘Sound Argument’ 94n, 108, 110‘Tack and Tack’ 103n‘The Tinker’ 61‘Tom Bowling’ 3, 6, 76, 116, 143, 208,

213, 219‘Tom Tackle’ 224‘The Trial’ 224‘True Courage’ 17, 116–36, 207‘’Twas Post Meridian’ 213‘Vanity Reproved’ 109‘A Voyage to Margate’ 18, 137–44, 151,

153–4, 156–7‘The Waggoner’ 61‘Wapping Old Stairs’ 208‘The Woodman’ 61, 108, 111

Dibdin, Thomas John (1771–1841) 11, 13, 18,107n, 134, 136, 141, 146, 156,171–2, 178, 182–3, 186, 189–203,205–6, 209, 223

Dickens, Charles (1812–70) 209Dissent, see ReligionDowton, William (1764–1851) 193Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859–1930) 216Drury Lane theatre 4, 7, 12, 13, 16, 24, 36, 41,

161, 164, 174, 178, 180, 189,195–6, 201

Duck, Stephen (1705?–56) 6, 61

Edgeworth, Maria (1768–1849) 98nElliston, Robert William (1774–1831) 201Emery, John (1777–1822) 189

Fairburn, John (d.1854) 141Farington, Joseph (1747–1821) 223, 225Farley, Charles (1771–1859) 194Fawcett, John (1769–1837) 192, 197Fielding, Henry (1707–54) 100, 106, 184Foote, Samuel (1720–77) 12, 92, 106, 141Fordyce, James (1720–96) 109Fores, Samuel William (1761–1838) 15–16, 66,

146, 153–4, 157, 158Fox, William (1736–1826) 226France 12, 73, 75, 76, 87, 91, 117, 129, 131,

175–7, 200. See also FrenchRevolution

Freemasons’ Tavern 74Freeth, John (1731–1808) 89French Revolution 8–9, 15, 76, 86, 94, 115,

117–18, 222Friedrich II of Prussia, aka Frederick the Great

(1712–86, r.1740–86) 94

Gainsborough, Thomas (1727–88) 163Gardiner, William (1770–1853) 115Garrick, David (1717–79) 12–14, 23n, 36, 83,

94n, 136, 141n, 166, 186, 213Gay, John (1685–1732) 33Gender 17, 23, 30, 33–6, 39–41, 74n, 96–7,

104–5, 108–12, 131, 174George III (1738–1820, r.1760–1820) 73nGeorge IV (1762–1830, r.1820–30) 53, 76, 96,

143Germany (music of ) 117, 213–14Gillray, James (1756–1815) 15, 30, 68, 95, 98nGilpin, William (1724–1804) 208Girtin, Thomas (1775–1802) 177Godwin, William (1756–1836) 223Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?–74) 14, 71–2, 83Graves, Richard (1715–1804) 98–100, 105Great BritainEmpire 72, 75, 87, 111, 185, 214, 226.

See also Caribbean, Jamaica, India,South Africa

England (regions of ) 17, 26, 60, 64n, 126–8,156, 178–9, 189

England (rural) 59–63, 89, 94, 96, 98,111, 128

England 25, 37, 42, 52, 87, 104–5

247Index



Great Britain (Continued )Bath 108nBirmingham 89, 94Blackpool 218Blenheim 96n, 99Brighton 128, 132, 139, 174Bristol 128, 132Cumberland 128Dover 100Harrogate 146Hull 128Lake District 156Liverpool 39London 15, 17, 44, 58, 60, 64, 71, 89, 94,

127–8, 139, 175–9, 209, 213Blackfriars (Surrey side) 12, 44, 55–6,66, 178

Charing Cross 178Chelsea 176–7, 216City of 124, 160, 164, 176Ealing 118Greenwich 176, 178, 204Hammersmith 95, 96nHanover Square 210Hoxton 101Islington 171, 180, 186, 188King Street 161, 164–5, 167Leicester Place 119, 127, 137, 165Leicester Square 167St Giles’s 178St Pancras 66Strand 94–5, 137, 153, 164–5, 167, 198Streatham 14Tottenham Court Road 105–6Tottenham Street 95Wapping 139Well’s Street 100Westminster 178Whitehall 95

Lyme Regis 164–5Manchester 39Margate 137–9, 141, 143, 156, 226Newbury 95Newcastle 127–8Norwich 80, 126, 164Oxford 14Penrith 128Portsmouth 213, 216South Shields 128Southampton 66, 124Wargrave 96, 105Weymouth 139Wynnstay 96Yarmouth 91York 127–8, 200

Government of 52, 67–8, 72, 79, 84–5, 93,174, 185, 188, 198, 207, 222

Ireland 66, 73, 75, 90, 100, 115n, 141,212–13, 224

National Character 31–2, 37, 42, 63, 64, 72,79, 86, 89–90, 98–9, 105, 111, 117,130–1, 139–43, 179, 185, 205,214–19, 227. See also Loyalism andRoyal Navy

Scotland 115n, 127–8, 216Wales 115n

Grenville, William, 1st Baron Grenville(1759–1834) 90–1

Grieve, John Henderson (1770/1–1845) 174–5Grimaldi, Giuseppe (1709?–88) 12–13, 50,

55, 57Grimaldi, Joseph (1778–1837) 12, 172, 174,

176, 182–3, 194, 199, 201

Hague, Charles (1769–1821) 129Haiti 94Handel, Georg Frideric (1685–1759) 54–5,

112n, 204Hanover Square Rooms 210–14Hardy, Thomas, radical (1752–1832) 225Harlequin, figure of 27–9, 38–9, 52–3, 105,

174, 176, 180–1, 194, 198–9, 201Harris, John, publisher (1756–1846) 164Harris, Thomas, theatre manager (d.1820) 12,

194Harvey, William, aka Aleph, journalist

(1796–1866) 136Haweis, Hugh Reginald (1838–1901) 206Hayes, Philip (1738–97) 14Haymarket 4, 12, 39, 55, 188, 189, 191–2,

196–7, 199, 201Hays, Mary (1759–1843) 139Haywood, Eliza (1693?–1756) 23–4Hinton, William, publisher 144, 153Hobart, Albinia, Countess of Buckinghamshire

(1737/8–1816) 94–5, 97Hobart, George, 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire

(1731–1804) 95nHogarth, George (1783–1870) 44, 80–1,

125–6, 132, 205, 207–10Holcroft, Thomas (1745–1809) 194, 223Hook, James (1746–1827) 15, 61Hook, Theodore (1788–1841) 192Hughes, Charles (1746/7–97) 12–13, 43–5, 50,

55–7Hunt, Leigh (1784–1859) 181, 189–93,

197–8, 201

Illegitimate theatre 43, 48, 53–8, 72, 95–6,100–1, 106–7, 171–88, 198

Inchbald, Elizabeth (1753–1821) 71n, 104, 195Incledon, Charles (1763–1826) 131, 193India 24–5, 75, 76Italy (music of) 2, 24, 32, 41, 54, 71, 76,

117, 214

Jackson, William, composer (1730–1803) 116Jackson, William, journalist (1737?–95) 69, 92

Index248



Jamaica 24Jennings, John, printer 15, 128Johnson, Samuel (1709–84) 5, 14, 15, 74n,

82, 91

Kelly, Frances Maria (1790–1882) 198–9Kelly, Hugh (1739–77) 83Kenney, James (1780–1849) 192Kenyon, Lloyd, 1st Baron Kenyon

(1732–1802) 99King, Thomas (1730–1805) 12King’s Bench, Court of 78, 79, 178King’s Theatre 53, 96Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936) 204Kitchiner, William (1778–1827) 126, 132,

143, 145Knight, Charles (1791–1873) 131Knight, Edward (1774–1826) 194, 198Kotzebue, August von (1761–1819) 195

Lamb, Charles (1775–1834) 194–6Lancelott, Francis, composer 132–3Laurie, Robert (1755?–1836) 15–16, 149, 157Lee, Henry (1765–1836) 133–4Lennox, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond

(1735–1806) 95–6, 98Lisle, Mary (1795–?) 131–2Liston, John (c.1776–1845) 192, 194, 196–200Liszt, Franz (1811–86) 212Locke, William, journalist 78Loutherbourg, Phillip James de (1740–1812) 39Loyalism 2, 3, 8, 15, 76, 79, 84–93, 105, 111,

115, 118, 128–32, 181, 204, 222–7Lyceum 158, 163, 198Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 1st Baron

(1803–73) 202

MacNally, Leonard (1752–1820) 69, 70nMalibran, Maria (1808–36) 213Marshall, John, London printer (1756–1824)Marshall, John, Newcastle printer 16, 128Mathews, Charles (1776–1835) 103n, 106n,

192, 196Melodrama 190–1, 195–6, 201–2Mendelssohn, Felix (1809–47) 212Minor theatres, see Illegitimate theatreMiscellaneity 3–8, 10–11, 15, 19, 43, 49, 57,

74–5, 95, 103, 124–5, 186–8, 221–7Molière, aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin

(1622–73) 129Molleson, Alexander, writer 117Moncrieff, William Thomas (1794–1857) 202Monopoly, theatrical, see Illegitimate theatreMoody, John (1726/7–1812) 26Moore, Thomas (1779–1852) 173, 184More, Hannah (1745–1833) 92, 115, 130, 207–8Morland, George (1763–1804) 16, 18, 151–4,

161–4Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91) 177, 206

Munden, Joseph (1758–1832) 189, 192, 194–6Music halls 7, 100, 126, 132Musical meaning 35, 109, 116–18, 122–3,

132–3, 143, 182, 214, 226

Napier, Sir William (1785–1860) 209Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1769–1821,

r.1804–15) 91, 173, 175Napoleonic Wars 8, 87, 115, 117, 123–4,

129–31, 171–3, 175, 181–2, 205,207, 209–10, 217, 221–2, 227

Nares, Edward (1762–1841) 99Navy, see Royal NavyNelson, Horatio, 1st Viscount Nelson

(1758–1805) 124, 212–13, 216–19Nile, Battle of the 217Novosielski, Michael (1747?–95) 53

O’Bryen, Dennis (1755–1832) 69, 74O’Hara, Kane (1711/12–82) 54O’Keeffe, John (1747–1833) 80, 125Old Price Riots 97Olympic theatre 178, 188, 196Orientalism 30, 36–42, 98, 105, 173–4,

185, 201Ottoman Empire 30, 39–41, 185Oxberry, William (1784–1824) 194

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) 94, 103Palmer, Joseph (1756–1815) 156Pantomime, see Harlequin, figure ofParry, John (1776–1851) 134Pasquin, Anthony, see Williams, JohnPatriotism, see Loyalism and Great Britain:

National CharacterPeace of Amiens 62, 173Percy, Thomas, Bishop of Dromore

(1729–1811) 61, 213Perry, James (1756–1821) 69Phillips, Henry (1801–76) 204–8, 210–16Pic Nic Society 95–7, 101n, 107Pilon, Frederick (1750–88) 71nPindar, Peter, see Wolcot, JohnPiozzi, Hester Lynch (1741–1821) 14Pitt, Harriet (1748?–1814) 13, 171Pitt, William the Younger (1759–1806) 8, 72,

85, 87, 222Pitts, John, printer 15, 16, 128Place, Francis (1771–1854) 15, 115Plumptre, James (1771–1832) 129–30, 145–6Pocock, Isaac (1782–1835) 192Poole, John (1785/6–1872) 202Portugal 209–10Powell, James, civil servant 99–100, 105Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) 94Print culture 15–16, 18, 31, 55, 64–77, 78–9, 80,

94, 96, 99, 108, 124, 126–8, 131–6,140–57, 158–67, 184–8, 189–93, 200,202, 205, 209, 216–17, 226

249Index



Prior, Matthew (1664–1721) 23–4, 30Private theatricals 17, 94–107, 110Prussia 94Puffs 46, 48, 65, 70, 82–3, 99, 137

Race 2, 9, 16, 23–42, 98–9, 111, 141–2, 225–6Radicalism 8–9, 79, 84–6, 89–90, 92, 100–1,

129, 180–1, 188, 225Ranelagh Gardens 4, 12, 16, 62Rede, Leman Thomas (1799–1832) 26nRedigé, Paulo the Younger, actor 182Reeves, John (1752–1829) 86Religion 40, 87–8, 94, 109, 123, 130, 185–6,

195, 197, 205–8, 212–14, 227Reynolds, Frederick (1764–1841) 189–92Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92) 14, 166Roberts, Piercy, publisher 156–7Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867) 201Rowlandson, Thomas (1757–1827) 15, 130–1,

153–6Royal Academy 154, 164–6, 223–5Royal Circus 4, 12, 16, 43–58, 62, 66, 172–3,

177–8Royal Exchange 75Royal Navy 4, 8, 19, 63, 85–6, 111, 115, 122,

129, 133–4, 136, 156, 163, 172, 174,181, 195, 205, 208–10, 214–19

Russell, Henry (1812?–1900) 134Russia 24, 43, 175, 181Ryan, Richard (1750–1818) 124Rymer, Thomas (1642/3–1713) 70

Sadler’s Wells 4, 12, 16, 18, 171–88, 189. Seealso Aquatic theatre

Sailors, see Royal Navy andDibdin, Charles: andthe sea

Sancho, Ignatius (1729?–80) 26nSans Pareil theatre 180, 188Sans Souci 8, 13, 17, 75, 78–81, 84–5, 94–5,

99, 101–2, 106, 110, 124–6, 134,137, 146, 153

Sayer, Robert (1724/5–94) 149, 163Scott, Jane (1779–1839) 180, 188Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832) 173, 196Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl

of (1671–1713) 10Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 7, 25,

27–30, 74, 99–101, 104–5, 132, 186,193–4, 196

Shelburne, William Petty, Second Earl of(1737–1805) 52

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751–1816) 71, 74,105n, 107n

Shield, William (1748/9–1829) 15Shuter, Edward (1728?–76) 83Siddons, Sarah (1755–1831) 13Slang, see DialectSlavery 9, 23, 25–42Smith, Charles Manby, antiquarian 132

Smith, John Raphael (1751–1812) 18, 161–7Smollet, Tobias (1721–71) 143South Africa 25Southcott, Joanna (1750–1814) 185Spain 178, 181, 185, 209Spence, Thomas (1750–1814) 130Spencer-Churchill, Lady Charlotte

(1770–1802) 99Spencer, Caroline, Duchess of Marlborough

(1743–1811) 96Spencer, George, 4th Duke of Marlborough

(1739–1817) 96Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729) 67, 75, 117Stephens, Catherine (1794–1882) 109, 186Sterne, Laurence (1713–68) 74Stevens, George Alexander, actor

(1710?–84) 103Stevens, George, journalist (1736–1800) 74nStockdale, Percival (1736–1811) 94nStorace, Ann ‘Nancy’ (1765–1817) 193Storace, Stephen (1762–96) 15Surrey theatre 172, 178, 189Swan, Isaac, journalist 78–9, 83–4, 92Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 72, 76

Taverns 74, 100, 101, 164, 200Taylor, Edward (1784–1863) 80, 82, 116,

125–6, 206Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron (1808–92) 214Terence, Publius Afer (c.195–c.159 BC) 193–4Theatre Royal, see Covent Garden theatre,

Drury Lane theatre, and HaymarketThelwall, John (1764–1834) 7, 8, 226Thompson, Edward, playwright 174Thomson, James (1700–48) 61Topham, Edward (1751–1820) 76Trafalgar, Battle of 6, 216, 219Turner, Joseph Mallord William

(1775–1851) 218

United States 24, 38, 72, 75, 128, 132–3,214–15

Universal Songster 15

Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth ‘Eliza’(1797–1856) 196

Voltaire, aka François-Marie Arouet(1694–1778) 73, 129

Waldron, Francis Godolphin(1744–1818) 105–6

Ward, William (1766–1826) 151, 153–4, 163Warren, Sir John Borlase (1753–1822) 124Waterloo, Battle of 175, 181Watts, Isaac (1674–1748) 187Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of

(1769–1852) 181West Indies, see CaribbeanWest, Temple (c.1740–83) 44, 66

Index250



Whittle, James 15–16, 149, 157Wilkes, John (1725–97) 64William IV (1765–1837, r.1830–7) 134Williams, John, aka Anthony Pasquin

(1754–1818) 67n, 105n, 142, 146,157

Winston, James, theatre manager 201Wolcot, John, aka Peter Pindar

(1738–1819) 139

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97) 94, 139Wood, Sir Henry (1869–1944) 6, 219Woodfall, Henry Sampson (1739–1805) 69,Woodfall, William (1745–1803)

82–3Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) 6, 7

Yearsley, Anne (1753–1806) 6Young, Thomas (1773–1829) 221

251Index


CHARLES DIBDIN AND LATE GEORGIAN CULTURE

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